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Underwater rocks could be used for massive carbon storage on America's East Coast Jeremy Hance mongabay.com January 05, 2010 Today, researchers writing in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) have announced a number of locations in the East Coast of the United States that appear prime for CCS. The potential sites—off Long Island, Massachusetts, and northern New Jersey—are deep under the sea bed in basalt rock, which researchers say has many advantages over other rocks, such as sandstone. "We would need to drill them to see where we’re at," said David S. Goldberg, lead author and geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in a press release. "But we could potentially do deep burial here. The coast makes sense. That’s where people are. That’s where power plants are needed. And by going offshore, you can reduce risks." The biggest concern with such sequestration methods is leakage of CO2, but researchers say that these sites should largely mitigate that risk. Not only are the sites deep underwater, but they are also covered over by hundreds to thousands of feet of sediment, both barriers to leakage. The gas would be pumped into the basalt, filling in the rock's gaps by displacing sea water. "The basalt itself is very reactive, and in the end, you make limestone," explained coauthor Dennis Kent, also of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in a press release. "It’s the ultimate repository." According to the researchers, a patch of basalt measuring seven cubic kilometers, such as the one under New Jersey's Sandy Hook Peninsula, has the capacity to hold nearly a billion tons of carbon. That is equal to forty years of emissions from four 1-billion-watt coal plants. Critics of carbon capture and storage argue that the technology is still unproven and that leaks are possible. Also, the process of carbon capture and storage requires additional energy usage, ultimately driving further consumption of fossil fuels instead of weaning the world off its addiction to fossil fuel energy. Most environmentalists prefer clean energy, such as wind, solar, and geothermal. Related articles Record year for CO2 emissions, even with economic slowdown (11/17/2009) 8.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide was emitted into the earth's atmosphere in 2008, a growth of 2 percent despite the economic crisis. This averages out to each person contributing a record high of 1.3 tons of carbon, according to a report in the journal Nature Science. While the global recession slowed the growth of fossil fuel emissions for the first time this decade, it did not lower emissions altogether. Geoengineering schemes need ranking system to avoid wasting money, destroying the planet (10/26/2008) Schemes to alter Earth's climate on a planetary scale should be ranked according to their efficacy, cost, risks and their rate of mitigation, argues a new editorial published in Nature Geoscience. With so-called geoengineering proposals proliferating as concerns over climate change mount, Philip Boyd of New Zealand's NIWA warns that "no geo-engineering proposal has been tested or even subjected to preliminary trials". He says that despite widespread media attention, scientists have yet to even come up with a way to rank geoegineering schemes for their efficacy, cost, associated risk, and timeframe. Thus is it unclear whether ideas like carbon burial, geochemical carbon capture, atmospheric carbon capture, ocean fertilization, cloud manipulation, 'space sunshades', or strategically-placed pollution can be effective on a time-scale relevant to humankind, economical, or even safe. Will carbon credits-for-forests scheme be undermined by carbon negative bioenergy? (12/18/2007) The Indonesian government has signed an agreement with energy giant Total E&P Indonesia on a carbon capture and storage scheme that could eventually lead to the development of carbon negative bioenergy production in the southeast Asian country, reports Biopact. The deal raises fears that feedstock for production could lead to large-scale deforestation of the country's remaining forests and undermine efforts to push forest conservation-for-carbon credits (or REDD) initiatives.
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