LA VETA — Bill Townsend, a one-time Texas oilman, gazes up at a dark-red smokestack jutting from the cracked clay of southern Colorado and shakes his head.
The chimney is connected to a small plant that processes natural gas from the surrounding plains. About 25 percent of the gas is methane, which is separated out and sold to Colorado Interstate Gas Co. Most of the rest is carbon dioxide, which, on this August morning, climbs the stack and pours into the cobalt-blue sky.
The La Veta plant, brainchild of Townsend and his partner, Greg Spencer, is ready to sell its carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming. Yet $7 million in new equipment to ship the gas sits idle because oil company BP Plc has yet to open part of a 400-mile pipeline that will take it to West Texas.
There, Townsend and Spencer’s plan is to bury the carbon dioxide in aging oil wells.
“All our money now is going up that pipe,” Townsend says.
Townsend and Spencer, who met in a Utah Bible-study group in 1985, are wildcatters of the carbon-dioxide era. They comb the country looking for ways to help companies cut greenhouse-gas emissions and then take a cut of the profit. They’ve signed contracts with more than a dozen companies, including utilities such as Entergy, giving them a share of earnings when captured emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, sell in the fledgling U.S. carbon-trading market.
In that market, greenhouse gases that have been diverted from the atmosphere are packaged as pollution credits, known in the U.S. as “offsets.”
They have projects in 45 states, including efforts to bury carbon dioxide from power plants and capture methane from rotting pig waste.
“There’s a biblical mandate to care for the planet that we have failed, as a culture and as followers of Christ, to do effectively,” says Spencer, 50. “This opportunity is a privilege. The success is a blessing.”
