Capturing carbon

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BISMARCK — Someday, maybe soon, Congress or the state of Minnesota is going to put the kibosh on carbon dioxide emissions in the battle against global warming.

When that happens, North Dakota’s lignite coal industry and its allies want to be ready to store carbon dioxide underground.

The state will not just be ready but out ahead of the rest of the country if legislators pass two bills under consideration, a head regulator said Friday.

“What you are doing is really cutting edge,” Lynn Helms, director of the state Department of Mineral Resources told the Senate Natural Resources Committee while testifying on Senate Bill 2085 and Senate Bill 2139. “North Dakota is as far along as anybody.”

If passed, the new laws would regulate how CO2 could be pumped into oil and gas fields, coal seams and deep saline formations and held there indefinitely, out of the earth’s atmosphere. Helms’ department would be responsible for the regulating.

The bills — and the current research on how carbon dioxide gas can be pumped underground and sequestered — are a joint effort of industry and state government agencies.

“It isn’t all that simple and it isn’t all that cheap,” said John Harju, associate director for research at the University of North Dakota Energy and Environment Research Center, one of the members of the working group that wrote the bills.

But he also said North Dakota’s unique geology gives it a leg up on creating and maintaining CO2 injection projects.

“This is really one of the most incredible places on earth to do these projects,” Harju said.

Others in the working group are the attorney general, Department of Mineral Resources, Lignite Energy Council, Petroleum Council and state Health Department.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, whose coal-fired Antelope Valley power plant is working up a carbon sequestration demonstration project that may start in about 2012, favors the new laws, as does Great River Energy, operators of the Coal Creek Station power plant near Underwood.

The bills, said Al Christianson of GRE, “are very important to our industry.”

No one testified against either bill.

A key section of SB 2095, Helms told the senators, is that eventually the state takes ownership of the sequestration projects and maintains and monitors them.

“This is the only practical way to do this,” he said, after Harju testified about storing carbon dioxide underground for thousands of years.

SB 2139 protects landowners whose property overlies the “pore space” where carbon dioxide is stored. It declares that surface owners are the legal owners of pore space and that the ownership of pore space can’t be “severed” from the surface and sold off separately.

The committee took no immediate action on either bill.

Cole works for Forum Communications Co., which owns The Jamestown Sun