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."

Comments

Only helps a little

[WalksOnDirt]

Given how the article talks about how expensive carbon sequestration is, nuclear plants seem to be a better option for producing electricity. You're not going to be able to separate out 100% of the carbon dioxide from the waste stream anyway.

The example of reducing the emissions from steel plants is very interesting. I'm sure there are ways to refine steel that don't release carbon (e.g. electrolysis), but using coke would probably still be much cheaper even with the costs of removing most of the carbon from the flue gases. Getting steel plants to implement this without being wiped out (by carbon emitting overseas competitors) or supported by massive government subsidies sounds very tricky, though.

I really think the best first step for reducing green house gases is to stop producing more coal fired power plants, and schedule the eventual closing of the current ones. The amount of damage done to the atmosphere by the remaining oil to be extracted is probably manageable, but there is enough coal (and tar sands, oil shale, etc.) to cause much more severe problems.

A dangerous idea

[B.D.Mills]

The idea of hiding the CO2 underground makes me uneasy. There's no guarantee that the CO2 is going to stay put. Suppose an earthquake ruptures the chamber. What then? If the CO2 comes out, it will kill anyone in the vicinity through asphyxiation.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.asp

Google for "carbon dioxide lake deaths" to learn more on why this is a dangerous idea.

Don't sequester CO2: grow food in space

[Randym]

The energy required to compress CO2 and then pump it underground leads to the generation of yet more CO2, because the process is not (and can never be) 100% efficient.

What we *need* is giant balloons (filled with sunwarmed gaseous CO2) carrying food-bearing plants to float in the atmosphere. Using the abundant solar energy, the plants can be kept at the proper temperature to grow; they can be grown hydroponically using sun-melted frozen water (from the same place as the frozen CO2); they are right there in the sunlight; and the frozen CO2 all around them can be melted and fed to them (thus generating oxygen in the process, which, when bled off, can, at those altitudes, be zapped by cosmic rays and create more protective ozone.)

When the food-bearing plants are mature, segments can be split off and ferried directly by remote control back down to places on earth where famine is epidemic, thus bypassing corrupt governments. The fuel would be methane generated by using sunlight and water to compost non-food stalks and roots.

Seriously. Except for the obvious lack of political will to do this, it is only an engineering problem. At one stroke it will solve the excess-CO2 problem AND the lack-of-ozone problem AND food shortages anywhere on the globe.

Come on, slashdotters: find something technically wrong with this proposal. Can you?