The CO2 Underground
Carbon Capture Remains Elusive
By Richard Martin, 1-18-08
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The U.S. Department of Energy will fund a 10-year, $38 million project to study the long-term storage of carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations on the Gulf Coast. For the next 18 months, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas will pump about a million tons a year of CO2 into brine formations up to 10,000 feet below ground, near the Cranfield oil field about 15 miles east of Natchez, Miss.
Part of DOE’s 10-year Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program, the Gulf Coast CO2 storage experiment is one of numerous efforts underway to study the long-term effects of pumping huge amounts of carbon underground. (In the Northern Rockies, the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership is vying for similar federal dollars.) It’s thought that there’s enough storage capacity in Texas alone to hold 40 years worth of U.S. CO2 emissions, theoretically for thousands of years.
The limitations of these efforts are daunting, though. The DOE program is studying only sequestration, the back end as it were of any large-scale capture and sequestration system. (The CO2 being injected in Mississippi is actually being trucked in from a naturally occurring formation nearby – not from power plants.) The economic challenge of constructing a significant carbon capture-and-sequestration industry in a timeframe to slow global climate change currently overwhelms the promise demonstrated by the technology. Among others, a panel of scientists from MIT headed by former former undersecretary of energy Ernest Moniz has called for an immediate and substantial increase in the federal research funds devoted to carbon removal and storage, to lower the costs and commercialize the process.
Capturing and storing 60 percent of the CO2 emitted by U.S. coal-fired power plants would require the transport and disposal of a daily volume roughly equal to U.S. oil consumption per day, according to the MIT report.
Texas alone could hold 40 years’ worth of US emissions.
In other energy news:
-- Another appealing option for creating more U.S. energy “independence” is oil trapped in shale, much of it in deposits in Western Colorado. The Energy Dept. estimates that there are some 2 trillion barrels of shale oil beneath American soil – the problem lies in getting it out. Chevron, Exxon, and particularly Shell have all made announcements about restarting shale-oil exploration on the Western Slope. So far, reports the Cortez Journal, those intentions haven’t borne much fruit..
-- One energy production effort that is moving forward toward reality on the Western Slope is uranium mining, which is in demand thanks to price increases and soaring demand in Western Europe and in Asia. State legislators from Northern Colorado are struggling to head off opening of a proposed uranium mine near Fort Collins that would use the controversial mining method known as in situ leaching.
-- Matt Baker is an unpopular choice for the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, in certain quarters, because he’s an environmentalist. Gov. Bill Ritter, who has led an ambitious plan to make Colorado a renewable-energy leader while promising not to abandon conventional souroces like oil, gas, and coal, named Baker – the executive director of Environment Colorado, who helped lead the passage of Amendment 37 requiring utilities to make renewable energy 10 percent of their power base by 2015 – to the PUC last week. For Republicans like state Sen. Josh Penry, Baker’s appointment is “like waving the white flag on energy independence.”
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Comments
There should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants unless cost-effective technologies to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide become available—and it doesn’t look like there’s anything on the drawing boards that will sequester carbon dioxide anytime soon. Carbon sequestration by itself will cost more per kilowatt than the entire production cycle for solar and wind energy--and that's even before you consider the huge costs of the coal itself, coal power plants, etc.
As hard as it will be to accept (especially in coal-crazed Montana), all coal burning power plants that don't capture the CO2 will have to be bulldozed. Coal power plants are a major emitter of CO2, which has been largely responsible for increasing Earth's temperature since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Cost effective energy conservation and renewable energy technologies are here now--so let's get off this fossil-fueled Titanic and move on to the real economic solutions--solar, wind, and energy efficiency.