Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a new way to boost oil production while also storing more carbon underground—a promising step that could make oil recovery cleaner and more efficient.
The method, called alternative carbon carrier technology, uses specially designed chemical compounds that can hold more carbon than conventional methods.
Instead of simply pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into underground rock to push out trapped oil, scientists are transforming CO2 into new compounds, such as sodium formate or potassium formate.
These compounds can be injected into the rock, helping extract more oil while locking carbon away more securely.
This approach offers three major benefits at once: it produces more oil, stores more carbon, and reduces the chance of carbon escaping back into the atmosphere.
Oil companies have long used enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process where CO2 gas is injected into reservoirs to dislodge leftover oil and store the gas underground.
While this helps reduce emissions, it doesn’t maximize storage. By converting CO2 into formate compounds, researchers believe they can achieve much better results.
A recent study by UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences and the Cockrell School of Engineering tested the method in computer models of oil fields in the Permian Basin of West Texas.
The results were striking: the new method recovered up to 19.5% more oil and stored up to 17.5% more carbon compared to traditional CO2 injection. It also trapped carbon in a more stable way, reducing the risk of leaks.
One of the key advantages is that formate solutions are thicker than CO2 gas, making them better at sweeping oil out of rock pores. When alternating injections of CO2 gas and formate solution, researchers found it improved both efficiency and safety.
“The idea behind this technique is to maximize oil recovery while also increasing the amount and security of carbon storage,” said lead researcher Abouzar Mirzaei-Paiaman. Co-author Ryosuke Okuno explained that treating CO2 as a raw material for new carbon carriers, instead of using it directly, creates a smarter path forward: “We don’t really have to use the CO2; we can find a better way.”
Despite these encouraging results, the technology is still in early stages. Producing formate from CO2 on the scale needed for oil recovery is not yet possible. The researchers say government policy and financial incentives for carbon storage could help accelerate its development.
“Whenever policy and regulations support a technology, companies move in that direction,” Mirzaei-Paiaman noted.
If scaled up, this method could give the oil industry a way to balance energy demands with environmental responsibility—turning a greenhouse gas into a tool for both production and storage.
