Carbon Sequestration

Didn't Amory Lovins once warn us about substituting what he scornfully referred to as "technical fixes" for intelligent energy policy? We think that was back in the 1970s. It's odd that so often we spend billions of dollars trying to mitigate the dreadful impact of some technology we've invented, rather than just putting a stop to it altogether.

Well, if you ever thought that trying to pump carbon dioxide into the ground to store it for eons - instead of curbing emissions - was a bit far fetched, you weren't wrong. Some new scientific studies are showing that the carbon dioxide does funny things to the minerals it encounters underground.

Watch this space for new scientific updates on the technology of carbon sequestration - still thought of as a promising way to allow us to build more coal plants. (And by this we're not talking about natural carbon sequestration.)

But hey, it's "Big Science," takes a lot of money and engineers, and it flies in the face of logic and the natural order of things, so it has irresistable appeal to energy planners.

A Possible Snag in Burying C02 (Science Now, AAAS, June 28, 2006)

Monitoring CO2 storage in brine formations: lessons learned from the Frio field test one year post injection; Susan Horkova et al