Daily Science Dose

I tend to think that if you are sweeping dirt under a rug, you are avoiding the real problem of the dirt being there in the first place. I kind of feel the same way about carbon sequestration.

The US Department of Energy has recently published its Carbon Sequestration Second Atlas, and in that atlas, it is estimated that there is enough space underground to store the next 1,100 years worth of carbon emissions from both the United States and Canada. Of course, it is only an estimate of available storage space that hasn’t exactly been tested yet.

Unfortunately, despite my reluctance to accept the efficacy of carbon dioxide being pumped into porous rock formations, saline formations, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, or unmineable coal seams, carbon sequestration may be one of many steps we humans have to take in order to turn back the tide on global warming due to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

It seems to me that if you first try to cut carbon emissions via clean energy technology, then maybe drilling into these deep underground spaces wouldn’t be necessary. However, I don’t see any drastic cuts in emissions any time soon. I wish it were otherwise, but this world is too fractured by both national and corporate interests to come to any kind of smart plan to combat our own pollution.

What makes carbon sequestration a silver bullet? No one can say with any degree of certainty that trapping carbon dioxide underground would stay trapped. Seems like it is just more “burying our problems”, a out of sight, out of mind mentality. And Yucca Mountain comes to mind. Or your friendly, necessary(?) muncipal landfill. Is it just a natural human tendency to want to bury things?

However, regulations have to be passed in order for anything to happen on a large scale, said Howard Herzog, a principal research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The only way carbon capture will occur in any meaningful way is if there are policies that give businesses an incentive to do it, Herzog said.

“Until there are policies that restrict the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s always going to be cheaper to emit” instead of capture and store the gas, he said.

If businesses do receive incentives to put carbon dioxide underground, federal regulations and inspections will have to ensure the gas doesn’t leak out.

“If you put it in the ground, you want to make sure it stays in there,” Herzog told UPI. “You don’t want to pay for something if you don’t get it.”

And make no mistake about it, someone will have to pay for it. Herzog and his colleagues at MIT estimate current investments in carbon capture and storage need to triple for wide-scale implementation to occur. For the federal government, that would mean increasing the annual carbon storage budget from about $300 million to $1 billion.–UPI via Terra Daily

Oh, wait, it’s going to cost us taxpayers money and big business is going to have to be urged to bury their/our carbon emissions responsibly? Add to that the increased costs for the energy produced at those power plants that will be passed down to the consumers (who will know be paying twice for this carbon sequestration service).

Yeah, that’ll work.

carbon sequestration, clean coal, US, United States, Canada, Department of Energy, atlas, porous rock, formation, saline, oil mine, power plant, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, global warming, Yucca Mountain, landill, business, consumers, energy costs