The two major questions will be:

(1) Can they get these plant segments to work together under oil field conditions in a continuous operation?

(2) Can they achieve cost reductions to get the cost of recovered CO2 somewhere around $100 per ton?


Say they do get the price way way down to $100/ton eventually - that is still adding $50/ton to each barrel of oil burned, right? (One barrel of oil ends up generating about $475 kg of CO2, so removing a ton of CO2 is basically removing the CO2 generated from burning 2 barrels.)

A barrel of oil costs about $80 right now. Putting the price to $130 (by virtue of a carbon tax, for instance), would be a much more economically sensible way to limit CO2 in the atmosphere, and you could build 1000s of new schools with the money instead of building 100s of these multi-billion dollar factories. But I know that is politically impossible, so I guess we have to live with these monstrously expensive efforts to lower the CO2 in the atmosphere. At least it's not at OXY shareholders' expense, but as a (non-US) taxpayer, I find these things disturbing...

dtb