Energy Department backs huge Louisiana project to store carbon dioxide in the ground

the Energy Department announced Wednesday that it was conditionally prepared to guarantee as much as $2 billion in loans to the Lake Charles Methanol project, which represents a different variant on carbon capture and storage. In this case it isn’t stripping carbon out of the coal-burning process, but rather out of petroleum coke or “petcoke,” a remnant of oil refining that is often exported out of the United States and burned in other countries.  The Lake Charles Methanol project, based in Louisiana, plans to use gasification technology to turn petcoke into syngas and then from there produce the industrial chemical methanol, along with hydrogen. Another byproduct of this process is carbon dioxide. Then it will sell all three products — methanol and hydrogen industrially, and the carbon dioxide to be pumped to oil fields in Texas, where it could be used to help recover additional oil from the ground. The carbon dioxide is expected to be able to unlock about 4.5 million barrels of oil per year, the company says.