As the pumpjacks whir ceaselessly in PanCanadian's Weyburn field, bringing up medium-light crude oil, some of it with the help of a flood of carbon dioxide, a group of scientists in a research centre in Regina watch the results on an ongoing basis.

The Weyburn field is not the biggest or most productive oil field by any means, but it has attracted the attention of several governments and scientists around the world who want to know if they too can use this method to remove and store underground what the world's environmentalists know as a greenhouse gas emission: carbon dioxide.

PanCanadian's CO2 miscible flood project is showing scientists in other countries that it is possible to sequester the gas underground, but as the project has only been on-line for one year, this technology raises many questions: is it financially viable? what happens to liquids, gas and rocks underground? what other applications are possible with this technology?

To help monitor what is happening with PanCanadian's project, the federal and provincial governments chipped in to help set up the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, which operates in conjunction with the Saskatchewan Research Council and a number of corporate and government partners.

The CO2 project has a definite economic benefit for Weyburn and area, as the life of the Weyburn oil field has now been extended by 20 to 25 years at least, enabling the oil companies to extract another 130 million barrels of oil, in addition to the 335 million barrels already removed from the field since its discovery in 1955.

At the same time as PanCanadian and their partners were actively working to set this project up in the last half of the 1990s, world-wide concern over the so-called greenhouse gases brought about a historic agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan, under which many of the world's governments committed themselves to reducing emissions of these gases, including carbon dioxide. When PanCanadian finally brought their project on-line in October of 2000, other countries took notice as this seemed to be a low-cost and practical way to dispose of CO2 without emitting it into the atmosphere.

Enter Dr. Tom Davis, a native of Creelman and currently professor of geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines based in Golden, Colo. He headed up a seismic crew that used cutting-edge technology to do seismic readings of an advanced sophistication not seen anywhere else in the world, and they took baseline readings of a particular nine-square-kilometre patch of the Weyburn field before the injections began.

Now, one year later, he brought a crew of about 35 people and several pieces of very expensive monitoring equipment to take detailed nine-component 4-D seismic shots of the same area after carbon dioxide has entered the field. He will be back again next year at the same time to do another series of shots, and the data will be put together to show a seismic picture in four dimensions: one vertical axis, two horizontal axes and the dimension of time.

To put it into layman's terms, it's like time-lapse photography, only the picture is being taken of what is going on underground.

Sitting in the recording truck in the field, Dave Crowther and Martin Godwin watch the computers and produce long reams of readouts from the seismic shots, as the "thumper truck" makes its way through the nine-sq.-km grid. The truck is a $250,000 US prototype tri-axle vibrator unit built in Texas, able to pound vibrations into the ground along the vertical axis (up and down) and along two horizontal axis (side-to-side). The vast majority of seismic shots are only taken vertically.

The results of the vibrations are picked up by an extensive series of geophones, 1,200 groups of them spaced 40 metres apart throughout the grid. These are hooked into 600 data collectors, (worth about $10,000 each), linked by over 50 km of cables into the recording truck. In addition to the geophones on the ground, there is also an array of high-resolution monitors (or VSP: Vertical Seismic Profiling) which were lowered in a well to take readings of the vibrations from the well site at the centre of the grid. These readings were monitored by Hugh Jones in a separate recording unit from Geospace Engineering Resources Inc., based out of Houston, Texas.

As Dr. Davis explained, the vibrations shake and twist the rock formations underground so they can gain a picture of how carbon dioxide is affecting them, and how it acts in relation to the rock and fluids.

Once the seismic crew was done in early October, analysis of the data will begin and will wrap up by about December, said Dr. Davis. With the seismic shoot costing upwards of $600,000 to do, a number of partners helped the Colorado School of Mines do the work, and they will also share in the data results.

This data, in combination with all the background that is known about the Weyburn field since its discovery, makes the field one of the "world's best-documented target sites for enhanced oil recovery by CO2 injection," says the web site for the Petroleum Technology Research Centre (PTRC).

The coordination of all the research going on with the Weyburn project, including of Dr. Davis' seismic team, is handled by the PTRC, with interest in the research building all the time.

"We are negotiating with the U.S. Department of Energy; we're just finishing that up. There are also companies from the oil industry and power industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan, we have funding through European researchers and we have a commitment from organizations in Japan to participate," said Moberg, who as general manager of the PTRC is the principal investigator of the research group.

The interest is driven by the Kyoto commitment to reduce such greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide, he said, adding, "There aren't too many projects like this in the world."

He noted there are CO2 miscible floods going on the U.S., but the amount of data available on those fields is limited, where all aspects of oil production in the Weyburn field is freely available.

"We have a lot of cooperation from the operators, PanCanadian, and they will also benefit from the insights we can gain," he said.

As for the 4-D seismic shoots being coordinated by Dr. Davis, Moberg said researchers are hopeful this advanced technology will be able to "see" the movement of carbon dioxide underground. Another different aspect to this shoot, besides its element of elapsed time, is that the seismic crew also listened with their equipment for key sounds, as the carbon dioxide is injected into the field.

"We listen to hear if there's any cracking or popping of rock from the CO2 being injected. It's like listening for (earthquake) tremors. There are always releases of stress in the rock. Out of that you can get the picture of what's going on," said Moberg.

With the CO2 project estimated to extend the life of the field by 20 to 25 years, the research will also be ongoing, and the benefits will begin to be seen elsewhere in the world as other countries begin to apply what is learned in the Weyburn oil field.