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Enhanced Oil Recovery Economic & Job Benefits

Does Increasing CO2-EOR Create Jobs? Yes. Workers will be needed across the full CO2-EOR value chain: from building and operating CO2 capture systems at power plants and other industrial facilities, to constructing new pipeline networks to transport CO2, to retrofitting and giving new life to existing oil fields.

For example:

  • The Kemper County Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle project in Mississippi, a new plant currently under construction, will create around 300 permanent jobs from power plant and supply chain operations. Employment during construction is expected to peak at 1,150 and average 500 jobs over a 3.5 year construction period. (DOE, 2010)
  • The 2010 Midwest CO2 Pipeline Feasibility Study included an analysis of job creation prepared by Northern Illinois University (NIU) on a proposed Midwest pipeline – which would transport manmade CO2 captured from coal gasification plants in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast. NIU stated the pipeline construction would create over 3,500 local jobs over a four year construction period and over 2,000 jobs from indirect economic activity. (Lewis and Bergeron, 2009)
  • The Wyoming Grieve Field project (Fladager, 2011), a small-scale CO2-EOR project that has been approved for construction, will generate more than 50 construction jobs to revitalize and return an aging oil field to service. It will also add five to ten operations jobs and produce 12 to 24 million barrels of additional oil that will inject millions of dollars into Wyoming’s economy through taxes, royalties, and local purchasing.

Does Increasing CO2-EOR Stimulate the Economy? Yes. CO2-EOR will create and preserve high-quality jobs and enable states and local governments to realize additional revenue, inject millions of dollars into local businesses, and reduce oil imports and trade imbalances.

Recent estimates by the U.S. Carbon Sequestration Council (Carter, 2011) show that expanded CO2-EOR could provide up to $12 trillion, equal to about 80 percent of the U.S. national debt, in economic benefits to the U.S. over the next three decades, based on the “multiplier effects” of oil production on economic activities. The multiplier effect is the tendency for newly generated wealth to transfer hands and be spent several times.

A report by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology’s (TBEG) Gulf Coast Carbon Center (TBEG, 2004) quantifies the total economic activity of oil production for Texas to be 2.9 times the value of the oil produced. In other words, almost two dollars of additional economic activity is created for every dollar of oil produced. Moreover, TBEG estimates 19 jobs for every $1 million of oil produced annually.

Advanced Resources International (ARI, 2010) estimates that an increase in oil production from CO2-EOR could reduce net crude oil imports by half and provide up to $210 billion in increased state and federal revenues by 2030. ARI also estimates that a robust EOR policy could reduce the U.S. foreign trade deficit by $11 to $15 billion dollars (2007 dollars) in 2020 and $120 to $150 billion by 2030. Cumulatively, this reduction in oil imports would keep $600 billion here at home, generating additional economic activity, jobs and revenues, rather than flowing out of the U.S. economy to other countries.

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