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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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    I've seen programs where scientist are creating artificial trees to filter out and capture the CO2 in the air so it can be stored underground. That is all well in good for desert climates like much of Australia. But why go though all that trouble in areas that you can plant a tree or some other vegetation? Why even store it at all. Why not produce a filtration system that uses say a huge reservoir of plankton to take that captured CO2 and convert it into oxygen? We are at a point in time where we are able to engineer a simple organism like algae or plankton to be more efficient at photosynthesising CO2. Then when said organisms are used up from the filtering process we can use them as fertilizer or fuel keeping the natural cycle of things going.

     

    Nature has a way of taking care of itself even with all the unnatural stuff we do with it. So why not work with nature for the solution to the problems we create? Capturing and storing is a short term solution. Worst of all there is no financial incentive to really make it effective and worth doing. If we go with something like what I said above there is an opportunity to create a new industry.

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    Whilst I fundamentally agree with your solution, it is beset with problems. Like the Norwegians are generating electricity using oil, which they've got quite a lot of, but have difficulty growing anything as its either frozen or cold, radiant light being other element you need for photosynthesis. The Australins would need water, which is generally scarce in your average desert.

     

    So whilst I agree nature knows best, we are generating CO2 in all the wrong places, and cutting down huge bits of equatorial forest doesn't help. So I guess we need to generate less of the stuff, hence all these government policies.

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    The best way to use the CO2 anywhere is to pipe it into greenhouses.  You can oversaturate the inside air with the CO2, which will both retain more heat and spur a higher level of photosynthesis.

     

    As for water, Australia is surrounded by it.  They just need to pump it into the desert, set up solar stills and they would have more than enough fresh water for people and plants.  Espicially if they use closed cycle greenhouses.  They can control both the CO2 levels and humidity levels so they would not be losing water to the dry air.

     

    Plus as a side benefit, the left over brine would yield a lot of useful chemicals, including gold, potasium, sodium, chlorine, calcium and a few trace elements.  They have the water, they have the sunlight, and they have the CO2.  They would get a much better return on their 1.6 Billion and build a sustainable ecostructure in the deep deserts.

     

    Just a thought,

    DAB

  • 0 in reply to DAB

    Interestingly the Dutch allready pipe CO2 in to their greenhouses from refineries.It increases yield, but doesn't help with heat.

     

    And although theoretically your pipe water / distill / and create greenhouses idea sort of works, where do they get the CO2 from? or do they pipe that as well? Hazarding a guess, 1.6billion wouldn't even get close to the cost of the scheme.

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