Simple By Comparison

As the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and others have documented, solving the energy-environment challenge today requires contributions from every sector and pursuit of all options. For a perspective on one of those options, carbon capture and storage (CCS), read the piece by Jeff Goodell in the Yale Environment 360 blog. Goodell summarizes a few of the challenges in moving CCS from concept to commercial scale operation. On the size of sequestration facilities needed, Goodell says:

Right now, there are three major carbon capture and storage projects in operation in the world (at one of the projects in Saskatchewan, Canada, the CO2 is used to enhance oil and gas recovery; storing the CO2 is secondary). The most significant is the Sleipner Platform in Norway, where StatoilHydro, a big Norwegian oil and gas company, has been pumping nearly one million tons of CO2 into a reservoir beneath the North Sea each year since 1996. It is an enormous engineering project, deploying one of the largest offshore platforms in the world. But compared to the engineering effort that would be required to stabilize the climate, it's nothing. It would take 10 Sleipner-size CO2 storage projects to offset the annual emissions of a single big coal plant.

He also discusses the potential environmental effects of underground storage of such quantities of CO2 and the legal and institutional framework needed to handle liabilities if escaping CO2 harms people nearby. Makes building a new nuclear plant sound simple by comparison.

Comments

GRLCowan said…

Refuting underground storage of captured CO2 is knocking over a straw man, because above-ground storage has, literally, rock-solid reliability, and is so much easier that it has been being done on a large scale inadvertently.

G.R.L. Cowan, H2 fan 'til ~1996

July 15, 2008 at 1:11 PM

Joseph said…

FIRST P0ST!!!

July 15, 2008 at 2:42 PM

Sneak Peek

There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
It's all around us. You can't feel it. Smell it. Or taste it.
But it's there all the same. And if you look close enough, you can see all the amazing and wondrous things it does.
It not only powers our cities and towns.
And all the high-tech things we love.
It gives us the power to invent.
To explore.
To discover.
To create advanced technologies.
This invisible force creates jobs out of thin air.
It adds billions to our economy.
It's on even when we're not.
And stays on no matter what Mother Nature throws at it.
This invisible force takes us to the outer reaches of outer space.
And to the very depths of our oceans.
It brings us together. And it makes us better.
And most importantly, it has the power to do all this in our lifetime while barely leaving a trace.
Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?

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