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Jingbian CCS Project has being conducted by Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Group and Northwest University since January 2012. CO 2 injection was started on September 4, 2012. There are five CO 2 injection wells in Jingbian Field. Till the end of June 2016, more than 60,000 tonnes of CO 2 were injected into Chang 6 reservoir group of Upper Triassic. CO 2 is captured from coal chemical company and transported by truck. CO 2 -EOR is expected to increase oil production in low porosity and extremely low permeability reservoir where water is hard to be injected. Through CO 2 -EOR, the current oil recovery is closing to 10% comparing with water recovery. At the same time, we systematically evaluated the capacity of Chang 6 reservoir. Safety of caprock seal ability and possible fracture distribution are studied as well. 3D reservoir model was made and reservoir simulation was used to evaluate CO 2 migration and predict the CO 2 leakage risk at different CO 2 injection stages. For the surface environmental monitoring, we studied the impact of CO 2 concentration on soil and microorganism, murine and fish was studied so that we might find indirect indicators for CO 2 leakage. Furthermore, 3D seismic baseline data was acquired in the second CCS site of Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Group.

The Ordos Basin has the richest natural resources in China. It has over one third of the coal resources of China and it is the second largest oil and natural gas sedimentary basin in China. The Yanchang Petroleum Group is the only company that has both coal and petroleum mineral rights in this basin, which provides a unique favorable condition for implementing a carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) project in China. The CCUS project conducted by the Yanchang Petroleum Group integrates a clean coal chemical plant with low-cost carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) capture facilities and CO 2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and storage in tight formations. The coal chemical plant produces methanol and acetic acid from coal using the Texaco coal gasification process. High purity CO 2 is separated from the methanol rich solvent. After compression and deep-freezing treatment, liquid CO 2 with a purity of 99% is produced for CO 2 EOR and the storage project. The cost of the CO 2 product is about 117 Renminbi (RMB)/tonne CO 2 , which is less than US $18/tonne of CO 2 . This cost is about half of the cost of CO 2 in the coal power plant (US $30-40/tonne). The captured CO 2 is transported to a CO 2 EOR and storage project about 30–100 km away, which is a much shorter distance than the required transportation distances of other commercial CO 2 EOR and storage projects. For example, the transportation distance is over 300 km for the Weyburn project. The short distances between the CO 2 capture facility and the oil fields further reduce the transportation costs of the CCUS project in China. The oil fields in the Ordos Basin are mainly tight formations with low reservoir pressures. Water resources are very limited in the basin. Thus, minimizing water usage in the petroleum industry can significantly protect the environment in this area. Carbon dioxide EOR can reduce the water usage and enhance oil recovery at the same time. An extensive experimental study was conducted to maximize the performance of CO 2 EOR in tight formations with low reservoir pressures. The current reservoir pressure in those oil fields is less than 10 MPa, which is far lower than the minimum miscible pressure (MMP) (16–22 MPa). Different approaches, such as CO 2 foam flooding and huff-n-puff, have been proposed to build up the reservoir pressure to enhance the oil recovery performance. A field pilot test, containing about 50 wells, has been conducted for four years, and the oil production rates for those wells have been doubled or tripled. This project is the first integrated CCUS project operated in China. Currently seventy thousand tonnes of CO 2 have been injected. In the next five years, this project will be expanded to 1 million tonnes of CO 2 injection, which will make it the second largest CCUS project in the world after Canada’s Weyburn project.

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal chemical industry in Northwest China, Yanchang Petroleum has deployed and developed a carbon dioxide capture project at one of its affiliated coal chemical plant in Yulin, Northwest China. The CO2 capture unit was built at a 200,000 t/a coal to acetic acid chemical plant. The CO2 is captured from coal gasification process using a Rectisol process, finally compressed and stored in liquid state with a pressure of 2.3 Mpa and a temperature at -17 ℃. 50,000 t/a of high concentration CO2 (>99%) was captured, and delivered to the Jingbian and Wuqi CCUS pilot sites by truck tanker for CO2-EOR and geological storage projects. The CO2 capture cost is less than 18 USD/t CO2 (

Jingbian CCS-EOR pilot project is the first full chain CCS-EOR project in China. Sponsored by China Ministry of Science and Technology, Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum (Group) Co. Ltd started to conduct CO2 capture from its coal chemical company and injected CO2 in Jingbian Field which cooperated with Northwest University from 2012. Our target is to inject at least 10,000 tons CO2 in Jingbian Field of Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum (Group) Co. Ltd. At the same time, we are developing an integrated MMV (Measurement, Monitoring and Verification) technique to monitor the safety of CO2 sequestration from surface to subsurface by using environmental, geophysical monitoring methods and geological analysis. At this low porosity and low permeability reservoir of Jingbian Field, we planned to inject CO2 in more than 5 wells and tried to get enhanced oil recovery ratio about 5% to 8% and form CO2-EOR techniques and a demonstration pilot project so that we may apply CCS-EOR in Ordos Basin which is the largest oil and gas production basement in China. Jingbian CCS-EOR pilot project is the same as the other CCS projects in the world. It includes site selection, CO2 storage and injection equipment construction, CO2 capture equipment construction, CO2-EOR laboratory tests and MMV study.