Texas firm harnesses carbon dioxide to extract oil from abandoned fields

Denbury's pipeline is central to GNO Inc.'s vision of an energy future for Louisiana built on carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery. Denbury now mines carbon dioxide from the Jackson Dome, a reservoir deposited by an ancient volcano thousands of feet underground. Denbury bought the dome in 1999 from Shell Oil, which had hoped to find natural gas inside, and the company uses the carbon dioxide to bubble oil from fields that others have abandoned. Denbury already has a pipeline that transports carbon dioxide from Jackson, Miss., to Donaldsonville. This year, it started expanding the pipeline across Louisiana, the nation's second-largest industrial producer of carbon dioxide. The company plans to buy man-made carbon dioxide and inject it into oil fields it owns in Texas.

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