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?
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