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Fracked Shale Could Sequester Carbon Dioxide
MTorrice writes "The same wells that energy companies drill to extract natural gas from shale formations could become repositories to store large quantities of carbon dioxide. A new computer model suggests that wells in the Marcellus shale, a 600-sq-mile formation in the northeastern U.S. that is a hotbed for gas extraction, could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030."
It kind of puts the environmentalists in a bit of a clamor. They wont know which way to go with this
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
600 square miles? It lies under at least 5 states. Someone needs to recheck their survey maps.
There's something ironic about extracting oil, burning it, and then putting the resultant CO2 back in it's place. Unfortunately, if this is only in the computer model stage it will probably be 2030 before it even has a chance of getting implemented.
That is, unless we come up with some catchy slogans to rally behind, I suggest: "Make the world a soda, carbonate our shale!"
Let's store the next 30 years worth of excess carbon dioxide in huge underground chambers
so that instead of gradual climate change that the environment can adjust to and compensate
for we instead have a massive catastrophic climate change when one of those chambers
springs a leak.
What could possibly go wrong?
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all in favor of Slashdot doing more shark tank jumping shout out!
What is with all this fracking schist?
Hire me...
Granted we need energy and it is critical to our success. It doesn't mean we allow energy companies to poison are air, ground and water. This is more spin by big oil for the reckless drilling they do. Fracking has already posioned ground water in many areas as well as caused earth quakes. More regulations are need to keep big oil in line. If you think that is a bad idea move to China where there are few regulation and please drink the water :-)
Water contaminated by chemicals and methane and then also a risk of deadly CO2 leaks. They better make the people whose homeland they fuck up filthy fucking rich.
Promoting fracking fracking? I understand that alternative energy solutions are disappointing, but don't promote fossil fuels, what the frack?
somebody hasn't seen Gasland (or Gasland 2)...
So far, there is no proof to demonstrates that CO2 has any negative effects on the atmosphere or the ecosystem.
The oil doesn't come out of chambers. It's a lo more like a sponge. Also this is a real old idea not sure why it's making /.
It all starts at 0
This article is tagged fracking. I do not think it means what you think it means. You know, this being slashdot and all.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Co2 in water forms a mild acid. It could be rather dramatic in its effects on water quality and also if limestone is present or several other kinds of rock the reaction might be rather violent over time. Try growing your house plants on carbonated water and you will rapidly see the problem. Maybe we could pump enough Coke syrup down with the CO2 so that the Earth could spew an interesting beverage. Let's rank the notion of down pumping CO2 as absurd.
Let's not bury our problems. Instead, let's bury some tree saplings and have them sort this carbon dioxide problem out.
Plant more trees!
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Any time I hear about underground CO2 sequestration, I think about the Lake Nyos Incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos Pumping mass amounts of CO2 underground would be a disaster waiting to happen.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Climate_Depot
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com
both are highly known as clime change deniers they are not reputable as you claim.
most real research is paywalled and/or sells books to fund their research above whatever grants they get. it is how academia works these are feel good stories for republicans to seed disinformation, as it takes all blame away from them.
even if the global warming is a result of the sun fusing higher density particles and not burning of fuels while deforestation there is still merit in finding ways to slow global warming. it's not 'shit we better burn all the coal we can before it all ignights and screws humanity'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
We'll need it to help warm up the Earth during the coming ice age!
the article says it's possible, not how it could actually be done, which seems like a rather important point.
The problem is we are un-sequestering it in the first place.
wikipedia says 104,000 square miles... perhaps 600 miles long? methinks someone skimmed the info.
It isn't enough to sequestrate the CO2. Part of the sequestration will include O2 needed for life. It would be much better to plant billions of trees which free up the O2 for humans and animals. Please, do it naturally, as man made attempts are often very short sighted.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030." -- Yes, well, but that can't actually be done... Additionally, 2030 isn't very far away. If I'm going to sell my future humans down the river I would prefer them not to be alive right now -- Or more importantly: I would like to be dead long before they realize we rigged their short lot on the temporal lottery.
Here, let me demonstrate how bullshit the claim is:
Sunlight at Earth's surface could provide ALL of the energy needed by mankind for the foreseeable future.
See? It 'could'. However, CAN we overcome the greed barrier and actually do so? Not fucking likely. Could, Should and Would, CAN go fuck themselves. Let me know when these mother frackers commit a 'Will'......
Speaking purely out of ignorance, since plants consume CO2 and release O2 you'd think people would be researching ways to genetically engineer plants or algae or something that could live in an artificial environment and act as a filter through which CO2 could be continually pumped until it reaches a "safe" threshold and then released into the atmosphere. Think of an aquarium, where the water is continually cycled through a filter, except when the water gets clean it would automatically empty and be refilled with new dirty water. I think the idea of just "sticking the shit somewhere" is a bit beneath us, excuse the pun.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
And in other news..
"The same seas that we evaporate and drive boats across could become repositories to store large quantities of plutonium. A new computer model suggests that holes in the Atlantic Ocean, a 106400000 sq-kilometres formation right next to the U.S. that is a hotbed for water, could store all the radio active waste emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2080."
0_o
Hivemind harvest in progress..
To leave a few surprising presents for future generations
some with long term effect, the radiating thingies and the ones with immideate effect - odorless, colorless gas taking your breath away.
There's only a small problem of extracting the CO2 from all the power plants combustion, liquefying it and transporting it up to hundreds or even over a thousand miles to the drilling site for sequestering.
It kind of puts the environmentalists in a bit of a clamor. They wont know which way to go with this
Not really. Sweeping environmental problems under the rug not only doesn't address the core issues but ignores that things have a way of slipping out from under the rug when no one's paying attention anymore.
Additionally, carbon sequestration is expensive and generates no sellable product. It's like dealing with mine tailings. As soon as a company no longer has to watch it to take care of accidental spills and leaks, they won't, leaving the government to pick up the bag.
Worse, one of the advantages of natural gas is that it's easy to transport and can be burned far from the source. How easy is it to capture carbon dioxide and then ship it all the way back to the fields to be sequestered? How much energy does that transportation take and how much does pumping it back into the ground take?
This is a loser of an idea. The only merit it has is as a fig leaf to justify more fracking, which only makes the problem worse.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Re: all the comments about infeasibility or time required to make this a reality... It's already being done. An exhausted oil bed in Weyburn Saskatchewan is being used to sequester CO2 from a power plant in the US - Montana I believe. The issue there now is that CO2 is heavier than air, so when it comes out of the fracked rock formation it tends to hug the ground in low-lying areas. A farmer local to the project has already claimed that the gas is leaking and killed several of his lifestock. Google around, I'm sure you'll find information on it. It's a project that's been on the go since around 2000.
planet texture maps and more
Those buzz words trying to grab all the people's attention...
The *cost* of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is way, way too high to do this. Even with cool tech, you've got to build the power plant right next to the sequestration site -- which means getting the fuel to the site -- which means building right of way, pipelines or rail, etc. Transmission lines too. Then you take the performance hit in the generation to run the sequestration equipment.
It's cheaper to build big wind in the breadbasket, lesser wind offshore, solar on roofs and in the southwest, bits of biomass and geothermal where it works, and use transmission to move it around. What about no sun or wind? Well, it's windy or sunny someplace nearly all the time in tUSA, but yes we'd have to use our ~21GW of pumped hydro storage differently, maybe build more, maybe use electric vehicles (EVs) for storage, maybe upgrade our infrastructure to change when we demand electricity [run electric hot water heater, air source heat pumps extra when flush with renewable generation so that we use them less when we'd be short]. All of that is way cheaper than CCS, and as a bonus it won't leak the carbon later, it doesn't require creating mini earthquakes, chopping off the tops of mines, figuring out what to do with the ash, the SOx, the NOx, the Hg, and other pollutants, the nuclear waste, how to deal with water shortage or water temperature problems, and on and on and on.
Look, I've been on slashdot 15 years or so. I know the community believes in nuclear power. The answer to CCS is the same as nuclear: it's too expensive. You can argue breeder or reprocessing or any number of other things, but the age of cheap gas has killed any nuclear renaissance, and the age of plentiful cheap wind in the breadbasket, plentiful expensive wind on the coasts [where electricity is expensive anyway], and plummeting PV costs means that nuclear and coal are dead for economic reasons, it's just a matter of time.
(footnotes) I didn't bother to provide links, but you might check out "2012 Wind Technologies Market Report," the economics behind the closures of Vermont Yankee and Kewaunee, "Analysis of Drought Impacts on Electricity Production in the Western and Texas Interconnections of the United States," the recent output reductions at Pilgrim and Millstone nuclear plants due to the Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound water too hot for cooling, how Xcel Colorado electric utility is procuring 450 of MWs of wind and 170 MW of solar because it's cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear, and on and on and on. We built loads of coal in the 50s and 60s, nuclear in the 70s and 80s, combined cycle natural gas units in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now those will operate until retire, while being replaced with wind, solar, some new gas, and energy efficiency. Know why? It's the cheapest way to do things. CCS (and nuclear) aren't, not by a long shot. There's no reason to think that they will be, either.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
So if it "could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030" why not state it as able to store 100% of the CO2 generated through some closer date? Particularly since it is all hypothetical anyway.
And then what?
please let us have pink ponies.
personally, I'd rather sequester the CO2 by growing a space elevator.
My greatest fear is that we don't have enough carbon to spare in the biosphere.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There's something ironic about extracting oil, burning it, and then putting the resultant CO2 back in it's place.
That must be the most roundabout way possible to use that fusion reactor that's just 8 minutes away.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I would prefer separating the C from the O2 rather than simply putting it away somewhere. And can it seriously put enough CO2 away to make a difference? I doubt it very much.
Some 30 billion tons of CO2 are supposedly released per year or about 10 billion tons of carbon. Hardly enough to build 75 x 75 square miles of forest!!!!!!!!!!! For fsck sake!! Is it time to drive out glow ball warmies from town halls, schools and governments? They together with energy traders are the bain of society creating massive energy bills. Its time to start changing the rules. All energy traders must take delivery of all they buy and store it for 6 months before they can sell again. That will really hurt their pockets as their money gets tied up in stocks they bought for speculation. All they want is a quick profit selling energy between traders and hiking up prices and slapping on all the trading fees and profits and then passing all those charges to the poor consumer who has to pay for it all!!!! Its Enron all over again but this time gone glow ball.
NO DOWNSIDES, I SAID!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
bonding it to low-impact-cultivated biomass that can either be then buried or sunk to the ocean floor.
Actually, since it's a hydrocarbon again I'd probably convert it into a fuel and burn it. Preferably capturing the CO2 yet again and using it as a regenerating system. It could be useful in peaking power systems.
Personally, my preference is to switch to carbon-neutral electricity generation systems, leaving coal usage for stuff it's particularly suited for such as steel production. My mix of electricity would be ~40% nuclear(baseload), 20% solar(increased power usage during day), 20% wind(easily doable at this percentage), and 20% other to include hydro, biomass plants and such. Note that these are single digit accuracy numbers - there's a lot of room for variances.
Get most vehicles to being electric, and you can drop CO2 emissions even more. We don't necessarily need to be completely carbon neutral - steel, concrete and such, but removing electricity and vehicles would take something like 2/3rds of the CO2 production out.
I don't read AC A human right
"Does it look like a bitch?"
"Noo!"
"Then why you try to frack it like a bitch?"
That is clever move from the fracking industry: now if you are a fracking opponent, you are against ecology. I guess it will be impossible to debate about the reliability and profitability of the process.
The energy to pump the CO2 into the ground isn't wasted. The force of pushing it down a well displaces residual oil and gas and allows more petroleum to be extracted from each well. Once liquid fluids have done the fracturing the CO2 can perform some degree of enhanced oil recovery.
It could potentially reduce the carbon footprint of so called dirty American and Canadian petroleum, reduce consumption of toxic fracking fluids etc. We already push natural gas, steam, nitrogen and all sorts of stuff into the ground to help get petroleum out
Sequestration is a big load of crap to attract government funding.
If all those research bucks are spent planting trees we'll all be better off.
Go well
Just the fact that you don't use sarcasm quotes on the word leak leads me to believe that what you read was most likely quoting directly from the original (and creative) Daily Fail beat up.
Realise that when people talk about useful idiots, they are talking about you! Wake up and smell the coffee, don't make it worse by getting angry with Science, make it better by getting angry at the people who are using you to squeeze the nuts of your local congress critter.
Posted anonymously - no need to thank me for the education.
Tree growth has been observed to increase dramatically in the wake of increased CO2 emissions, and that makes sense, since trees are our counterparts in the respiration cycle. CO2/O2 goes up -> more trees -> CO2/O2 goes down -> more oxygen
Potentially, many wells drilled for fracking could also be used as CO2 disposal wells. But you'd need to work the fracked well over (i.e., remove the hydrocarbon production and shut-in equipment) and minimally cement the fracking perforations while re-perfing into a reservoir rock formation ; a lot of the time you'd need to drill out of the bottom of your post-fracking well. Which ain't going to be cheap. Well, certainly it isn't going to be free.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
First pump loads of CO2 into the aquifer,, then add your favorite flavor... FREE SODA!....