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Solution, store bad CO2 underground

Catwell
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CO2CRC CO2 storage testing facility (Image via CO2CRC)
 
Some say CO2 is natural for the world, plants use it. Other say co2 is a green house gas and damaging to the environment.
 
Australia's Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) Is taking the side of harmful to the environment. They have a solution that boggles the mind, they are taking spent oil fields and deep saline aquifers and turning them into huge und underground storage tanks. The porous rock of the fields are capped with an impermeable layer, the gas storage is formed. The CO2CRC claims this setup could potentially store gases for millions of years.
 
The oil fields could store 900 giga-tonnes of CO2 due to their small size. While the aquifers could hold 100,000 giga-tonnes. The research team is currently evaluating the aquifer option. Hydrologist at Flinders University Peter Cook said he had some reservations about the aquifer's ability to hold the gas, " It's very difficult to predict how the gas will move underground."
 
Towards the end of June, a set of trace gases were injected into the aquifer, krypton and xenon. The team in monitoring the situations, taking samples and hope to predict the likelihood of CO2 leakage. Programme manager Matthias Raab said it is hard to tell if the noble gases will react the same way as CO2. So 150 tonnes of CO2 will be injected into the aquifer for true testing purposes.
 
Australia will spend $1.6 billion over the next five years exploring carbon capture devices.  Though it would make sense to spend the same amount on renewable technology, Rabb pointed out, "[solar power is not yet ready to fully replace fossil fuels]. Carbon capture cannot be the only solution to reducing carbon emissions, but it is has to be part of it."
 
The glaring problem, this solution will one day release all of its stored CO2. Then what?
 
To take the other side of the argument, a big carbon sink could be in the recent mega-blooms of phytoplankton filling in where glaciers has receded. The journal Global Change Biology, from the British Antarctic Survey, estimated the natural sink is taking ~3.5 millions tonnes of carbon from the environment annually just from a 24,000 km2 area on the Antarctic Peninsula alone.
 
Are Australia's efforts worth it, in your opinion?
 
Cabe
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  • 0

    Hi Cabe,

     

    A lot of energy companies have been doing this CO2 sequesturing for a number of years.  Will it work? Well that is the $1.6B question.

    If the rock domes are indeed air tight, then it is possible that the gas will stay contained.  That said, the earth is in constant motion with gravitational, plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc.  So it seems to me that it is only a matter of time before the structural integrity of the rock will be compromised.

    Normally, CO2 would seek the lowest level and stay there, but in this case, it is under a lot of pressure.  So the gas itself will try to permeate the rock and would almost certainly dissolve into any ground water that it encountered.  Either way the process is doomed to cause some future problem.

    What could go wrong, well lets look at some possiblities.

    1.  The gas breaks out of the dome and works it way towards the surface until it can equalize its pressure.  As I recall, it is the CO2 densities that trigger volcanos to blow, so that would be bad.  If it suddenly broke out under the ocean, we could see a huge CO2 bubble form in the ocean.  So not only would the CO2 go back into the atmosphere, but we would also have a potentially huge Tsunami.  I think we all know what happens then.

     

    2.  The gas stays contained, but causes pressures to change in the rock until it hits a fault line.  This event would most likely cause an earthquake, magnitude unknown.  As with any seismic event, triggering an earthquake in one place can cause a really bad earthquake somewhere else.  Most likely not a good thing.

     

    3.  The gas stays contained and we still get global warming.  I think I have made my views on this result quite clear.  If I had the $1.6B to bet, I would put it on this horse.  I think this is the most likely result to pushing CO2 into the ground.  IT JUST WON'T MATTER!

     

    4.  The gas stays put and we reverse global warming and go back into another ice age.  Well this one is my worst fear with all of the people trying to stop Global warming.  The Geologic record is very clear.  If the planet does not transition to hot earth, then it reverts to cold earth.  Cold earth will only support about 5% of the current population.  I do not like the odds of surviving this event.

     

    Bottom line, I think the whole fear of CO2 build up in the atmosphere is highly over done.  The planet has been through hundreds of warm earth and cold earth cycles over the last 2 Billion years.  Somehow I don't see anything that humans can do to stop it.  It happened before we  became the dominant species and it will probably happen long after we are gone.

     

    So if I was Australia, I would put the money to better use, like building a canal into the desert and pumping salt water into the dry areas.  The evaporating water would help ease their drought cycle and let them mine the minerals in the water for a profit, plus they could set up evaporation traps and collect hundreds of tons of fresh water daily.  The project would put many people to work and benefit the country much more positively then the CO2 project.

     

    Either way, it is going to be millenia before we will know the answer.

     

    Just my opinion.

    DAB

  • 0 in reply to DAB

    Dab,

     

    It really is speculation on their part to try this experiment. As we discussed in another post, Don't both designing green anymore?, it has been proven that we are at extreme levels of CO2 in the air compared to the past 600,000 years. It may take a millenia to get the answer.

     

    Sometimes projects like this sound like exploitation through projects. That is a lot of money for such a fringe concept, don't you think?

     

    Cabe

  • 0 in reply to Catwell

    Hi Cabe,

     

    As I said in my post, I think it is a $1.6 Billion dollar boon doggle.  But as you say, none of us will know for sure in our lifetimes, so if the Aussies want to waste their money, it is theirs to waste as they see fit.

     

    DAB

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