The biggest business of burying carbon

EPA carbon-storage permits must convince the agency that they can capture both injected CO2 and a second saltwater plume.₂ Displacement from rock – what drilling engineers call a pressure pulse. EPA requires evidence that no plume will contaminate drinking water during a project’s operation and for a post-CO default period of 50 years.₂ The needle stops – but the agency can decide to shorten or extend it for a particular project.

Stream will hire a well-heeled team, including oil industry veterans and a former top EPA official, to oversee the permit application, which was filed in October 2020 and is under agency review two years later. At the company, Stream named its carbon storage game Project Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and sometimes war).

The technical work was led by Peter Jackson, a British petroleum geologist who worked for BP. His team plans for Project Minerva in the same way that Meckel’s UT team mapped the Gulf Coast. Using well logs and 3D seismic data, the scientists mapped the Frio over several tens of thousands of acres in and around Gray Ranch. They then pretended to show the carbon dioxide plume and pressure wells where they would be drilled and how they would work.

In their computer models, the resulting plume motions appeared as multi-colored blobs against blue rocky backgrounds. The best spots were round, a compact shape that suggested the pipe would be easy to control. In other places the CO₂ He does not behave: sometimes he escapes to the top; Other times it spread like a pancake or, Jackson recalls, “like a spider.” Either form, the group said, could undermine project safety and raise alarms at the EPA. The simulations led the stream team to select two general locations on the farm where they planned to drill the holes.

The stream agreed to show me one morning. He picks me up in his prized black Chevy Tahoe in Lake Charles and we head west into Texas until we’re several miles from the state line. We pulled off the highway in Vinton, Louisiana and arrived at Gray Ranch. We turn right onto the gray road. We turn left on Ged Road. Then, on the cowboy-boot-shaped side of Gade Lake, we climb a hidden peak known as Vinton Dome.

These are familiar names in Stream family lore. In the year In the early 1880s, local surveyor John Geddings Gray—”Ged”—began harvesting this acer for timber and cattle profit. Four years after climbing Spindletop, Gade saw similar promise in the topography of Vinton Dome, which he purchased. He opened the place to dig, and the enthusiasm was planted.

Today, the top of Vinton Dome offers a partial panorama of the Stream Empire. Barns bearing the family’s cattle name and quarter-horse brand to the right. All around, rusted pump plugs rise and fall, pulling oil and gas. Stream, Ged Gray’s grandson, likens his ranch to roast beef for his three young sons, who think he’s the best steak cook around. “Only because I bought the prime filet,” he says. There is one rule: “Don’t touch it.”

We will stop at one of the waiting wells. The surrounding area is beautiful with wire grass, bluestem and ginger. It is associated with three types of calmness: cattle, great and snow. This being Louisiana, it is also stamped with a line of yellow poles; They mark the Williams Transco pipeline underground, which carries natural gas from the Gulf Coast platforms to the interstate gas distribution system. While it may seem strange that this livestock industry, which has been using fossil fuels for nearly a century, is playing a major role in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, it is important to measure how the economic signs of this long-established part of the world are changing. It has adjusted the way it uses its natural resources to meet changing market demand. People will eventually have to be patient to deal with climate change, says Stream. You can’t just talk about it.