Is CCUS Feasible? Wyoming's Triple Threat - the Cowboy Unicorn

With the passage of 45Q there is great discussion over the “financibility” of commercial scale CCUS. While 45Q does not eliminate all the financial risks it does provide an option to allow CO₂-EOR to provide a permitting and storage “back stop” to saline only CCUS projects.

Wyoming is special in that has a natural resource aware and likely a CCUS-willing citizenry, a positive and flexible regulatory frame work for CCUS, a supportive legislature and executive branch, and most importantly, it has the site characteristics needed to do both CO₂-EOR and saline storage. The Wyoming Integrated Test Center (ITC) located at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station is studying options to turn CO₂ it into commercial, beneficial re-use materials – this provides a CCUS project with a third option. This makes the ITC/Dry Fork Station the only facility on the planet that has the capacity, when completed, to deal with all three options for CO₂ – 1) beneficial re-use, 2) CO₂-EOR, and 3) saline storage.

Imagine a place that could offer multiple coal fired power plants that could beneficially reuse CO₂ from the flue gas, AND; supply CO₂ for CO₂-EOR flooding, AND; store CO₂ in saline storage or “stacked storage” sites. No, this is not a unicorn, but rather Wyoming’s triple threat. One, if not the only place on the planet that has the capacity to deal with all three types of CO₂ from a commercial CCUS project, and consider options to ensure that there are multiple locations within Wyoming where this is possible.

This presentation will discuss the transdisciplinary approach that has resulted in Wyoming providing this world-class opportunity to advance commercial scale CCUS, current and prospective sites, potential business structures, potential realization of carbon negative oil, and the application of newly drafted International Standards for both CO₂ Storage and CO₂-EOR.