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The DOE hopes to store billions of tons of CO2 in underground caverns
Geologic carbon sequestration gets put to the test

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $126.6 million in grants to test the feasibility of underground carbon sequestration in geologic formations.

Two test sites -- one in California, the other in Ohio -- will pump one million tons of compressed carbon dioxide into subterranean caverns designed to hold the gas indefinitely.  The DOE claims it has already identified enough underground locations to store more than 1,000 years worth of current emissions.

The current set of tests are designed to identify how effective underground caverns perform long-term storage, and how cost-effective the procedure will be. The Ohio test will be conducted below the Mount Simon Sandstone; the California test will be 7,000 feet below the San Joaquin Basin.

The project will eventually store 600 billion tons of CO2 in these two locations, according to Secretary of Energy Bud Albright.  In 2004, human emissions of CO2 totaled approximately 8 billion tons, according to 2004 data from the from the U.S. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.  Emissions from natural sources -- including volcanic sources -- are some 20 times higher: roughly 150 billion tons per year.

The DOE grants, dubbed "FutureGen," are subject to final approval from Congress. Private investment will bring the total price tag to $180 million.  The DOE originally planned to use the money to partially fund the $1.8 billion "clean coal" FutureGen plant in Mattoon, Illinois.

The 275 megawatt Mattoon facility would burn its share of Illinois' 104 billion ton coal reserves.  The plant was designed to pump emissions underground, rather than into the atmosphere.  However, with the new sequestration program, Albright simultaneously announced the DOE would reduce its pledge to Mattoon. Research from the new FutureGen projects would offset the DOE pullout, at least in theory.

In practice, however, the Mattoon facility will likely be abandoned in favor of smaller, cheaper facilities.

Environmental groups have already questioned the usefulness of FutureGen. Greenpeace issued a report this week calling carbon sequestration projects a "dangerous distraction." Emily Rochon, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace, says "carbon capture and storage is a scam," and that governments need to reduce emissions directly.

49% of U.S. energy production is currently produced by the nation's 600 coal facilities.  Another 100 facilities are scheduled to be constructed before 2030 in anticipation of rising oil prices.

Comments     Threshold


I don't get it....
By Connoisseur on 5/8/2008 1:52:46 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
The project will eventually store 600 billion tons of CO2 in these two locations, according to Secretary of Energy Bud Albright. In 2004, human emissions of CO2 totaled approximately 8 billion tons, according to data from the from the U.S. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC). Emissions from natural sources -- in particular volcanic sources -- are some 20 times higher: roughly 150 billion tons/year.


So is this a well known fact? Basically, it's saying that human CO2 emissions total only about 5% of all emissions worldwide? If that's the case, how is it that so many people argue that global warming is some crazy man made phenomenon? It stands to reason that natural emissions have a far greater affect on any theoretical climate shifts than anything humans can muster. Can somebody refute this claim?




RE: I don't get it....
By lightfoot on 5/8/2008 2:17:44 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
how is it that so many people argue that global warming is some crazy man made phenomenon?

I blame substance abuse, although science education in the US also shares some of the blame.

Ever wonder why it was a washed-out politican to point out the problem? Probably because politicians are respected more than scientists for their honesty.


RE: I don't get it....
By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 5/8/2008 2:28:07 PM , Rating: 4
Yes, this is well documented by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at ORNL. Raw data is here:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2004....

This data has been used as the cornerstone of global warming research for years, though it's not the only method. The UN's method, (as seen on Wikipedia), incorporates "equivalent" gases and other funny logic. Even by those figures, the global "equivalent" output is 27 billion tons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_...

That's still 1/5 of the 150 billion tons of CO2 emissions from things like animals and rock weathering.


RE: I don't get it....
By elgueroloco on 5/9/2008 11:45:18 AM , Rating: 4
And that 150 billion tons is just natural CO2. It doesn't count the natural "equivalent" gasses, such as SO2, which are also expelled in mass amounts by volcanoes and such. I've heard that when Mt. Saint Helens blew up in 1980, it released 10,000 times more "greenhouse" gasses than man had ever produced. I didn't notice any drastic global temperature increase from it, did you? Anything man does is utterly insignificant compared to nature.

I am so sick of this global warming BS. Think how much good that money could have done if we had spent it on a real environmental issue that can actually be helped, or on infrastructure or something.

Pumping CO2 into the ground is so utterly retarded I am at a loss for words. Do these people honestly think that filling an underground cavern with gas that could be feeding plants is going to have an actual effect on the globe other than starving plants?

Why don't we all just get together and do a massive rain/cooling dance with chanting to stave off the natural temperature fluctuations of the earth? It would have just as much effect, make just as much/little sense, and we'd have alot more fun doing it. Rave for the environment!!!

Holy crap I hate hippies.


RE: I don't get it....
By eskimospy on 5/11/2008 5:01:19 PM , Rating: 2
I'm not sure if your post was serious, I really hope not.

You might have heard that when Mount St. Helens blew up it released more greenhouse gases then in all of man's history, unfortunately that is incredibly, hugely false. That's why you didn't notice a lot of warming when it erupted.


RE: I don't get it....
By FITCamaro on 5/8/2008 2:38:12 PM , Rating: 4
Your post beat mine. :)

quote:
It stands to reason that natural emissions have a far greater affect on any theoretical climate shifts than anything humans can muster.


Man-made global warming advocates base very little of their reasoning on reason.


RE: I don't get it....
By Polynikes on 5/8/2008 9:58:51 PM , Rating: 2
That's why I'm so glad we're dumping millions more into this myth.


RE: I don't get it....
By MozeeToby on 5/8/08, Rating: -1
RE: I don't get it....
By FITCamaro on 5/8/2008 2:48:02 PM , Rating: 4
When the snowflakes begin to fall in Texas in July 2050, I hope we line up every global warming activist and flog them. Hell, why wait?


RE: I don't get it....
By MozeeToby on 5/8/08, Rating: -1
RE: I don't get it....
By masher2 (blog) on 5/8/2008 3:02:37 PM , Rating: 5
> " I highly doubt that wikipedia's numbers are off by several orders of magnitude "

Both Wikipedia and this article are correct. Volcanic sources are a very small part of natural CO2 emissions -- weathering of silicate rock and biologic sources are two of the largest.


RE: I don't get it....
By Seemonkeyscanfly on 5/8/2008 3:57:20 PM , Rating: 2
Termites – I have read they are the largest out-putter of CO2, and South America one of the largest supplies of termites. In a twisted way, if logging in South America kills termites...then it would be a pro-green life style change. So what if a good supply of the air we breath comes from those trees, and those trees need to high level of CO2 to grow correctly, and they need the termites to help clear out the old dead fallen trees to keep the forest clean, and the new trees need the fertilizer from the rotting trees (with help from termites) to grow, which will help produce more air for breathing....(circle of life)
Point being – man as a whole is not smart enough to try and control our environment, we will kill ourselves well before we help ourselves. We need to focus on things we can control, like get more out of the resource we use (better gas millage, more food per square foot farmed, control pollution out put in populated areas – non or low populated areas tend not to have this problem – do not reply with examples yes they are out there, replanting new trees after cutting them down)


RE: I don't get it....
By AlphaVirus on 5/8/2008 5:50:37 PM , Rating: 2
Just a question, how does weathering of silicate rock equate to higher CO2?


RE: I don't get it....
By Ringold on 5/8/2008 8:20:03 PM , Rating: 2
I don't know the relevance of silicon, but sedimentary rock, such as limestone, plus whatever sea creatures form when they collect on the oceans floor over millions of years, are huge repositories of CO2.

It would be logical, then, that as these rocks are lifted out of the ocean, in to the sky, and then eroded by weathering, that CO2 is then released once more -- so it can soak back in to the water, and get soaked up again by new sedimentary rock, etc.


RE: I don't get it....
By SectionEight on 5/9/2008 8:23:56 AM , Rating: 2
It doesn't. Weathering is a sink of CO2. It combines with water to form Carbonic Acid and can get locked up in the resulting weathering products. It is thought the rise of the Himalayas and the increased weathering of them is what brought CO2 levels down to their more recent (past several million years) level. CO2 was possibly 6x modern levels during the Cretaceous, pre-Himalayas.


By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 5/8/2008 3:18:30 PM , Rating: 5
CDIAC only exists to monitor human synthesized CO2 and nothing else. You can look at the raw data here:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2004....

So their numbers are extremely reliable, and widely used for many things.

Volcanos, as you mention, account for a small percentage of atmospheric CO2. The carbon cycle includes things like animals breathing, rock weathering, trees burning, etc. The 150 billion ton estimate is from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and is also widely used and cited.

What isn't mentioned in the article, or anywhere else really (since nobody really knows) is how much of that 158 billion tons of carbon (150 + 8) is "sunk" every year.

Even when the physicists calculate the parts per million in the atmosphere in relation to the amount of carbon we know has been released, there are very large disparities.

Unfortunately those sort of problems don't prove or disprove anything, they just make people step back and wonder why the heck we haven't figured out pretty large pieces of this puzzle before we started spending billions of dollars on framing it.


RE: I don't get it....
By PigLickJF on 5/8/2008 3:03:18 PM , Rating: 1
Just beacuse it's a small amount doesn't mean it's insignificant. A 5% increase of something in a system that is (or was) in equilibrium is a big difference.

For instance, let's say you consume 2000 calories a day, and your body burns off that same amount. You're in equilibrium - not gaining or losing weight. You decide hey, 100 extra calories a day is a tiny increase, no big deal, so you start eating that much more without changing anything else. Well, those extra 100 calories a day add up. That's about .02 pounds per day, again not much, until you realize that's almost 9 pounds a year. If you keep this up for 20 years (again, wihtout changing anything else), you'll have gained around 180 pounds, which will likely be affecting your health in some negative way.

The climate and atmosphere etc are obviously a much larger more complex system than that, it was just an illustration to prove the point that a seemingly small number can still mean a significant change, especially when compounded over time.

PigLick


RE: I don't get it....
By masher2 (blog) on 5/8/2008 3:12:29 PM , Rating: 5
By the paleoclimatic record, the global carbon balance has never been in equibrium, with CO2 rising and falling on a near-constant basis.


RE: I don't get it....
By daInvincibleGama on 5/10/2008 11:21:37 PM , Rating: 2
When the timescale of a (CO2 vs Time) graph are compressed to include hundreds of millions of years, it doesn't seem to be in equilibrium. However, it is likely that during any one "minute" period (a millenium?), the atmospheric CO2 levels had a lot of linearity. In terms of the bigger graph, this would be a local linearity. Earth's climate systems (which are essentially thermodynamic) have been in a quasi-static equilibrium for most of history, with that equilibrium sloly shifting.


RE: I don't get it....
By TheDoc9 on 5/8/2008 3:20:57 PM , Rating: 2
I think in a closed system where nothing changes this might be possible. Fortunately for us humans our lives are constantly changing and so are our metabolisms. Same for the planet, 5% is something but it's unreasonable to assume that the planet and it's systems would stay the exact same. Therefore we can conclude that by various means the planet will adapt, whether it be absorbing more c02 in the oceans, more plant life, more absorption into soil, venting it into space, ect.