Chinese state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec has commenced operation of the country’s largest carbon capture facility, at its Qilu refinery in eastern Shandong province. The CO₂ is to be used for enhanced oil recovery at 73 oil wells in the nearby Shengli oilfield, extracting an estimated additional 3 million tonnes of oil through the injection of 10.68 million tonnes of CO₂ over fifteen years. (Assuming around 0.45 kg of CO₂ is produced per kilogram of crude oil, this would mean a net injection of 9.33 million tonnes of CO₂, or 12.6% of the injected CO₂ being re-emitted.)

To begin with, the captured CO₂ from the Qilu refinery will be trucked to the oilfield, but a pipeline, China’s first, is being constructed to more efficiently transport the gas. Sinopec is planning a further two carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery projects of a similar size in the next few years, at the Huadong and Jiangsu oilfields, which are nearby.