The crews and managers of EnCana's Weyburn Business Unit quietly marked the 200th tour of their Weyburn CO2 miscible flood project on Thursday, after the Goodwater-based operation hosted the world's largest newspaper recently.

A special luncheon was held at EnCana with a number of executives from EnCana's Calgary head office on hand to celebrate with the Weyburn staff.

The 200th tour was by representatives of Yomiuri Shimbun, the world's largest daily newspaper by circulation, based in Japan, with a daily output of over 14 million copies in Japanese and English.

The tour guide, community relations manager Twila Walkeden, said she was told the story on how EnCana stores the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide underground will be a front page story for the daily around the end of May or in early June, as part of a series of stories on climate change.

"They were interested in the carbon capture aspect of our business, particularly the sequestering of CO2 underground, rather than how it enhances oil recovery," said Walkeden.

The interest in the technology has come from a wide variety of sources from around the world, and it has grown with the world-wide interest in the environment and curbing greenhouse gases, particularly the CO2; the idea of storing the gas underground has many countries intrigued as a way to deal with the pollution in their own countries.

The first tour ever given of the Weyburn CO2 project was in January of 2001, also of a group from Japan. The group included representatives of Japan Canada Oil Sands, Teikoku Oil and Japan Petroleum Exploration.

Most of those 200 tours over the years were given by EnCana employee Dave Craigen, who handed it over to Walkeden within the last year as she has taken on the position of community relations.

"We expected we'd be visited by industry people mostly. We didn't fully understand the interest in sequestering CO2 and how it would grow so fast," said Craigen.

Of that first group from Japan, he said their interest had to do CO2 emissions from their operations and how they might deal with them.

"Japan has a tremendous amount of coal-fired plants for producing electricity. At the time there was no urgency to deal with it, and now there is," said Craigen.

A world map on Craigen's office wall is dotted with pins, showing the many countries of origin of the tours he led over the years, which he kept up until he handed the tours over to Walkeden. The countries include Australia, the Philippines, China, India, African countries like Senegal, Ghana and Libya, European countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Austria, France, Germany, Croatia, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Brazil and Argentina from South America, Chile, and even a couple from Havana, Cuba, as well as throughout the continental U.S. and Canada.

Media interest has included the New York Times, L.A. Times, CBC, CTV, Global, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, Channel 4 from Britain, and newspapers from Tokyo.

From the scientific world and the oil industry, many have come from scientists' think tanks, oil and gas interests, the coal industry, and even research-and-development scientists from automakers like Nissan, Toyota and Rolls Royce's machinery division.

The interest from the auto-makers intrigued Craigen, and he found out they were developing a hybrid car using hydrogen, with CO2 being one of the waste products; the auto-makers wanted to know how they could deal with the CO2 without putting it into the atmosphere.

Craigen noted that two of the signatories to the original Kyoto Accord on the environment had also taken a tour of the Weyburn facility.

On a related note, a large contingent of climate scientists from the International Energy Agency have had tours at Weyburn; one group of 40 scientists were interested in the enhanced oil recovery by using the CO2, while the second group of 40 were more interested in the sequestering of CO2 underground, and the technology EnCana was using to do it, and to monitor how well the gas has stayed underground.

"They were updating themselves on the work that was being done and the research into it. They were coming to see if they were getting their money's worth," said Craigen, noting the agency helps fund the research centre based in Regina which monitors the work being done in the Weyburn field.

He said one thing he learned from his Japanese visitors was that the country imports 98 per cent of their energy needs, and found that many times he was learning things from his learned visitors.

For example, a scientist involved with injecting CO2 in a gas field off the coast of Norway visited the Weyburn project; this was one of the projects that then-PanCanadian looked at as they developed their technology for CO2 injection at Weyburn. The excitement in the world's scientific community was that Weyburn's project was far easier to get to and observe than the Norwegian project.

While EnCana uses the CO2 in the recovery of oil, this isn't the case in the Norway operation, so Craigen asked how they pay for the process, and was told the company is given a tax credit to sequester the gas under the sea.

"We're lucky enough to have an investment return, but how do others do it where they don't have that return? This is one way they can do that," said Craigen.

Asked who some of the more interesting visitors have been, he recalled some of the groups from China were very interesting, including one large group where one man did all the asking of questions and talking for the group. He was later told this man was the head of the state-owned oil company, and also mayor of the oil company's city which surrounds the oil field.

"I was told I should feel honoured that I talked to the mayor," he said.

With all of these international visitors, Craigen said he has several standing invitations to visit in such places as Portugal, Italy, Japan and Croatia, and he's hoping to make good on some of those invitations in the future.

Some of the most interesting questions, however, have come from students, and he has toured many school groups from as young as Grade 4 up to high school-aged students.