Farnsworth

The Farnsworth Unit (FWU) CO₂-EOR and storage project in Ochiltree County, Texas, was the Southwest Regional Partnership on Carbon Sequestration’s (SWP) Phase III large-scale demonstration of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). The project targeted the Pennsylvanian Morrow B sandstone at approximately 7,500–8,000 ft depth, where anthropogenic CO₂ sourced from a nearby ethanol plant and fertilizer facility was injected into a mature oil field that had transitioned from primary production to waterflood and then CO₂ enhanced oil recovery. The reservoir has moderate-to-good storage quality, with typical porosity around 15–20% and permeability ranging from roughly 10 to 1,000 mD, and is sealed by the overlying Morrow shale and additional regional sealing units. The goal was to demonstrate commercial-scale injection and monitoring approaches while integrating storage with ongoing hydrocarbon production operations. DOE funding supported extensive geological characterization, monitoring, verification, and modeling activities rather than the core oilfield operations themselves. Continuous monitoring systems tracked reservoir pressure, CO₂ plume movement, and environmental impacts, helping refine best practices for measurement, monitoring, and verification (MMV) in EOR-based storage projects. Injection rates averaged over ~500 tonnes per day with a target of about 1 million tonnes injected over roughly five years, providing real-world data on reservoir behavior, injectivity, and long-term storage performance. The project demonstrated that mature EOR fields with existing infrastructure can serve as practical early CCS deployment sites by combining emissions reductions with incremental oil recovery. https://www.southwestcarbonpartnership.org/