Southwest Mississippi Area Operations Manager Billy Biggers updated Brookhaven Kiwanis Club members on company activities, its history and plans for the future. He said the company uses carbon dioxide to get oil out of old fields.

"We basically take old oil fields and bring them back to life," said Biggers, who referred to the process as tertiary, or third level oil recovery.

Biggers said primary oil exploration efforts usually collect about 20 percent of oil from a formation while secondary methods, which utilize waterfloods, recover about 18 percent. Tertiary efforts recover another approximately 17 percent.

Denbury, whose corporate headquarters is in Plano,Texas, has been in Southwest Mississippi since the mid 1980s. It now operates several fields in Mississippi and is the largest user of carbon dioxide in the state.

Biggers touted company efforts to build an estimated $750 million pipeline into Texas. The company Web site said the line will be under construction into 2010 and is expected to carry carbon dioxide, both natural and man-made, to a field near Houston for company operations there.

Biggers also briefly discussed the company's economic impact on the Southwest Mississippi area.

In the area, Biggers said the company employs approximately 135 and has 100 to 300 contractors working on any given day. When asked by a club member, he did not have data on royalties paid to area landowners.

Biggers said Denbury is producing about 21,000 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) a day in the Southwest Mississippi. He said the company's Brookhaven field is doing "extremely well," as are several other areas where the company is currently operating.

"The Brookhaven, Mallalieu and Little Creek fields have been great CO2 floods for Denbury," Biggers said.