Carbon Dioxide Infrastructure: Pipeline Transport Issues and Regulatory Concerns -Past,Present and Future

摘要

The first long-line, high-capacity pipelines for the transportation of carbon dioxide ("CO_2") went into service in the United States in the early 1980s, delivering naturally occurring CO_2 from source fields in Colorado and New Mexico to oil fields in West Texas for use in CO_2-based enhanced oil recovery ("EOR") operations (or simply "CO_2-EOR"). In 1989 when the federal government decided for the first time to cover the regulation of safety in CO_2 pipelines, there were over 2,000 miles of CO_2 pipes with approximately a dozen covering distances of over 100 miles. Today there are over 5,000 miles of pipelines in the U.S. transporting both naturally occurring CO_2 and anthropogenic CO_2 extracted or captured from plant sources. The primary use for this transported CO_2 remains CO_2-EOR.