The US is set to begin experiments on storing carbon dioxide below ground, especially in underground saline aquifers; might be one way we can burn our coal and keep earth from warming too much.
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The same rock chambers that held oil and natural gas for millions of years also locked up carbon dioxide. For 30 years, the oil and gas industry has pumped carbon dioxide into waning oil fields to get at the last drops. By some estimates, those depleted deposits alone could hold 20 to 30 years of carbon dioxide released from all U.S. coal-fired power plants.
Coal beds that are too deep or otherwise uneconomical to mine also could hold billions of tons of carbon dioxide, while releasing methane back to the surface as an energy supply.
But the biggest reservoirs are deep, saline aquifers that underlie the Midwest, the Southeast and places like the Central Valley, some as ancient as the emergence of multi-cellular organisms and plants on the Earth and many times saltier than the ocean.
Those underwater seas are big and numerous enough to hold at least 100 years worth of U.S. emissions from all large stationary sources, from refineries to power plants to steel factories.
Coal beds that are too deep or otherwise uneconomical to mine also could hold billions of tons of carbon dioxide, while releasing methane back to the surface as an energy supply.
But the biggest reservoirs are deep, saline aquifers that underlie the Midwest, the Southeast and places like the Central Valley, some as ancient as the emergence of multi-cellular organisms and plants on the Earth and many times saltier than the ocean.
Those underwater seas are big and numerous enough to hold at least 100 years worth of U.S. emissions from all large stationary sources, from refineries to power plants to steel factories.