Right now the world is full of green rhetoric, which can be a bit oxymoronic. A greenhouse for plants is good; but greenhouse gases are bad. We all enjoy “The Green, Green Grass of Home” but we also can be green with envy. Wearin’ the green on St. Patrick’s Day is fun, unlike being a green army recruit. Being green around the gills has a negative connotation but kissing a greeneyed beauty surely implies the opposite!
Important to this discussion of green is the well-known fact that to go green requires greenbacks, often lots of them. Fortunately, in the industrial gases businesses, we work on both sides of the green fence — delivering good green solutions with gases like oxygen, hydrogen, and yes even CO2 (read on), and solving environmental problems with technologies that capture unwanted emissions and even find ways to use them productively. For our industry, green means “go.”
Are eco-green solutions and eco-green economics mutually exclusive? Given good old Yankee ingenuity and Southern common sense (I had to throw that one in since I live in the South), surely we can have our green eggs and ham. In fact, as an engineer involved in many applications that are eco-friendly, I see an ecologically-green environment multiplied by an economically-green business model as ECO-Green2.
Profitable ECO-Green2 examples from the petroleum industry include the still maturing, efficiency- and profit-increasing technologies of: CO2 drilling; CO2 used in hydraulic fracturing and well stimulation; CO2 equipment cleaning; CO2 used to clean drill cuttings; and Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) coupled with CO2 sequestration.
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