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© Les Stone / GreenpeaceThere is no reason to believe industry practices aregeared toward anything but maximizing oil sales.Creating an incentive for CC-EOR-with-Storage wouldrequire heavy carbon taxation, according to the IEA. 99There is no such policy in the US, and it doesn’t appearthe Republican-controlled Congress is anywherenear considering a carbon tax.There are few peer-reviewed studies of lifecyclegreenhouse gas emissions from CO2-EOR projects.However, one study of five projects revealed that –between mining coal capturing carbon from the coalplant, utilizing the carbon for EOR, and burning theproduced oil – CC-EOR can result in a net increase incarbon emissions. 100Achieving a net reduction in emissions wouldrequire making sure that most of the injected CO2does not escape with extracted oil, or at least thatit is ‘recycled’ (neither of which the proposed EPAcarbon rule on new coal plants would require). Eventhen, the practice would have to be industry-wide.If one company were obligated to capture the CO2which returns to the surface with extracted oil, theinjected CO2 does not stay confined to one drillingrig’s operations. As intended, injected CO2 becomesmixed and dispersed with the oil underground, whichmeans it can be extracted by other companies’ drillrigs as well. Thus, ‘recycling’ a critical majority ofinjected CO2 may not even be physically possible inmany cases. There is also the problem of abandonedwells, which the next chapter will discuss.The second false assumption is that CC-EORmakes strategic sense for scaling up investmentin CCS in general. The Global CCS Institute,NEORI, and others claim that this shrewdly harnessesoil industry profit incentive in order to augment overallinvestment in CCS. This view may be theoreticallysound with respect to capital investment in general,and perhaps with achieving economies of scale atsome point far into the future (too far to matter formitigating climate change). But it cannot be true whenit comes to building fixed infrastructure. It would notbe economical, nor practical, to take a) custom builtinfrastructure designed to scrub CO2 from a newlignite-fired power plant in Mississippi to pipe to an oilextraction site less than 100 miles away (i.e., Kemperplant) and then export it to b) retrofit a non-lignite coalplant in China in order to sequester the CO2.The NEORI optimism about harnessing privateoil investment appears to view oil money as finiteand public dollars as limitless – but they have itbackwards. Taxpayer dollars are scarce, whereas the2014 revenue of the top 15 oil companies was about$4 trillion, 101 more than the entire US federal budget.DOE claims to be subsidizing CC-EOR with the aimto encourage CCS at a scale that would benefit theclimate, which means it is ignoring its own analysis. ADOE-commissioned study concluded that “[CC-EOR]is unlikely to serve as a major stepping stone tocommercial-scale CCS deployment.” 102© Paul Langrock / GreenpeaceCarbon Capture Scam Chapter: 2Page 17