Blackstone Energy Partners and Blackstone Group affiliates have formed Windy Cove Energy LLC with a commitment to invest as much as $700 million of equity to acquire and develop carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery assets in the US.
Windy Cove says it intends to become a “leading producer of oil generated from CO2 EOR.” Chuck Fox is the Houston-based company’s president and chief executive officer, overseeing a team with “more than 70 years of combined technical and operational experience in CO2 EOR, primarily from Shell, Texaco, and Kinder Morgan.”
“More than 20 billion bbl of oil are estimated to be recoverable from CO2 flooding in the United States,” said Fox. “Many fields that are amenable to CO2 EOR are held by operators without the capital, expertise, or desire to execute a CO2 EOR operation.
Industry injects 3.5 bcfd of natural and industrial CO2 to produce 300,000 b/d of oil via EOR, and incremental production from CO2-EOR operations is likely to double to 638,000 b/d by 2020, according to an Oil & Gas Journal report published earlier this year (OGJ, May 5, 2014, p. 92).
David Foley, Blackstone senior managing director and chief executive of Blackstone Energy Partners, noted, “By providing revenue to providers of CO2 as well as putting that CO2 back deep underground, companies like Windy Cove can play a positive role in encouraging coal-fired power generation facilities and other sources of CO2 emissions to instead capture that CO2 for use in recovering oil from existing mature fields right here in the United States.”