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Long-Term Carbon Storage
zebadee writes "The UK has given £25 million ($45 million) in funding toward storing CO2 under the North Sea. The article at the BBC
has a discussion on how this will be achieved. Basically gases produced at the power station will be pumped into old oil and gas fields for long-term storage. This has the added effect of pressurising the wells, allowing better recovery of the contents."
Nature came up with its own long term carbon storage system long before we did.
It's called "diamonds"
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Personally, I think that every energy solution based on using 'cleaner' energy that I've heard of is at best too little too late, and at worst a simple case of whistling in the dark. If the world's energy usage continues to skyrocket the way it is, closing all the coal fired power plants in the world and installing the best scrubbers and catalytic converters and such on every other fossil fuel burning device is only going to put us a decade or two behind the current curve. Heck, I think that the entire idea of "clean energy" is a refuge for people who haven't considered the laws of thermodynamics and people who tend to tunnel-vision on only a few types of pollution. Even windmills will alter the planet's climate if you put up enough of them.
Really, the solution is to get people to quit using so @$%@$ much energy in the first place. Until we give up our need to have large houses with big, manicured lawns, motorized private transportation, having more than two children, and individually wrapped disposable everything, we're going to have to live with the possibility that we or our descendants are going to end up living on a planet that's not fit for supporting human life anymore.
Why choose to begin fixing our problems when we can instead sweep them under the rug? Or in this case, the ocean? It's not as if it'll still be there in 20 years when we've run out of storage space!
Anyway, my point is that the effort here is aimed at the problems caused by inefficient and polluting industrial processes - rather than fixing those processes instead, which would be a much more desirable goal.
I'm also wondering how much this will figure into any carbon emissions trading schemes that are going on in Europe..