Scientists Target East Coast U.S. Rocks for Carbon Dioxide Storage
ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2010) — Scientists say buried volcanic rocks along the heavily populated coasts of New York, New Jersey and New England, as well as further south, might be ideal reservoirs to lock away carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial sources. A study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlines formations on land as well as offshore, where scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory say the best potential sites may lie.
Some basalt on land is already well known and highly visible. The vertical cliffs of the Palisades, along the west bank of the Hudson River near Manhattan, are pure basalt, and the rocks, formed some 200 million years ago, extend into the hills of central New Jersey. Similar masses are found in central Connecticut. Previous research by Lamont scientists and others shows that carbon dioxide injected into basalt undergoes natural chemical reactions that will eventually turn it into a solid mineral resembling limestone. If the process were made to work on a large scale, this would help obviate the danger of leaks.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist David S. Goldberg, used existing research to outline more possible basalt underwater, including four areas of more than 1,000 square kilometers each, off northern New Jersey, Long Island and Massachusetts. A smaller patch appears to lie more or less under the beach of New Jersey’s Sandy Hook, peninsula, opposite New York’s harbor and not far from the proposed plant in Linden. The undersea formations are inferred from seismic and gravity measurements. “We would need to drill them to see where we’re at,” said Goldberg. “But we could potentially do deep burial here. The coast makes sense. That’s where people are. That’s where power plants are needed. And by going offshore, you can reduce risks.” Goldberg and his colleagues previously identified similar formations off the U.S. Northwest.
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As a mining engineer, the thought of injecting rock with CO2 to keep it from destroying the earth is nuts. I know there are plenty of people out there that think Greenland is going to capsize and dump it’s entire boatload of ice into the ocean, or that polar bears are going to invade Central Park and eat the natives because there’s no ice plates upon which to eat the last remaining seals up north, but I have a better idea:
Why don’t we just take the CO2 they’re planning on sequestering, press it together really hard, make diamonds with the carbon and release the leftover oxygen for us all to get high on? So what if we destroy the world’s diamond cartel? At least we wouldn’t have to worry about any rock formation leaking that nasty stuff back into the atmosphere for the plants to use. (I do hope they come up with a plant erradication program so the rest of the flora on earth doesn’t suffocate from lack of that dreadful gas since its been turned to diamonds.) Of course, we’d have to balance that out eventually with a progrom that reduces overall fauna, too, just to keep the gasses balanced. The most likely species to erradicate would be homo sapiens, because they’re the ones who have been digging up all that coal and burning all that oil and THEY started this big mess in the first place. It’t not nice to unbalance Mother Nature.
Maybe I’ll check myself into some place for the unbalanced, too. After that, I’ll plant some palm trees and watch them grow.
This is insanity, even without considerations as below:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/21/newsid_3380000/3380803.stm
Only a non carbon-based lifeform would want to rid the Earth of carbon.
Here’s your blockbuster sci-fi thriller title: Invasion of the Carbon Snatchers.
I know there are folks out there who are truly tired of living, but why must all Life on Earth perish to satisfy their thirst for extinction?
NIMBY.
The EPA have declared CO2 to be a dangerous poisonous gas – the stuff could leak, then what happens???
Not a single cent should be spent on this ridiculous proposal to store dangerous gases in or anywhere near urban centres…
Also, not a single cent should be spent to store this dangerous gas away from urban centres, it could disturb the pristine, natural environment.
That’s it – not a single cent should be spent.
“1984” meet “Atlas Shrugged”.
I’ve got some excellent rocks to sell that can be filled with hot air all anyone wants… a really good deal… [:)]
There is no concern of man, either real or imagined, which cannot be manipulated for profit.
“jorgekafkazar (19:16:59) :
This is insanity, even without considerations as below:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/21/newsid_3380000/3380803.stm
”
Another one: Lake at Goma. Also near a volcano.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7426154.stm
Nah what a silly idea, and the cost? huge.
Better to pump all that vegetable food into the atmosphere WHERE IT BELONGS.
Why don’t we simply pump all CO2 into the deep ocean where it will form clathrates? As the AGW scientists always point out, water exchange between upper and lower ocean is purportedly slow, why not just move it directly into the deep ocean?
It may be that there is a natural process that follows the above chemistry. I live on a basalt flow, near Basalt Mtn. in Colorado. I have very rich soil, filled with basalt from fist to boulder (car) size. All the basalt I dig up has at least a partial coating of white carbonate, I assume from precipitating from the acidic soil, lots of scrub oak, juniper and pinion. This coating can be a half inch or more thickness, and would represent a lot of CO2. Just another possibility of where some of the stuff goes.
Since power plants do not emit pure CO2, one has to separate it from the rest. On a chemical engineering viewpoint, separation of a mixture requires a huge amount of energy (= CO2 emission). The next stage, probably the liquefaction of purified CO2 followed by its pumping into the underground cave, also requires a healthy amount of energy (= CO2 emission). Have they carried out energy balance (= CO2 emission/removal balance) analysis correctly? It appears quite dubious to me……..
Just make the smoke stack tall enough to reach outer space. Let the vacuum pull the CO2 away.
transport CO2 to Mars… build a new home for progressives.
How much energy (CO2) will it take, to compress the CO2? I know air compressors suck lots of energy, just to compress to 100 PSI. How CO2 will be produced by the drilling process?
Why not plant…. plants, to suck in CO2 and use it to build plants. I know that process is rather new, but there must be someone with enough expertise, to make it work. Then the plants can be compressed into coal and burnt in power plants to produce CO2 – net effect, bio-solar power…
DirkH (19:14:48) : BTW the air pressure storage is of course needed as fast temporary buffer for wind power spikes.
Nice, Dirk!
I think this scheme has the potential for one of those “unintended consequences” outcomes.
I have no idea what they might be but the whole thing seems suspicious.
Gee, why not just make blocks of dry ice? We can ship them up north and drop them in the Arctic, where it will keep the polar ice from melting. Do it for the polar bears!
A waste of time, money, intelligence, effort. What more could a bureaucracy want?
savethesharks (19:13:46) :
I think increasing CO2 must be causing mass brain damage.
At hockey stick speeds. Perhaps there’s a paper and a big grant somewhere in there.
What’s that they say about truth and fiction?
This sound very much like perpetual motion to me. I would think it takes far more power to inject the CO2 into the rock formations than the power plant would produce.
I am going to ignore the whole “need” for sequestration question for now & only put on my geologic / reservoir engineering hat to comment.
Here’s a link to the original article:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464617/
The big problem here (technically, just for starters) is that this is completely unproven technology (chemical sequestration, in an actual field setting). In general, when chemical reactions occur in a reservoir setting , they almost always reduce permeability unless they are specifically designed to increase permeability (such as an acid frac in limestone, which dissolves the rock). This reaction is not designed to increase permeability – it is simply transforming one type of rock into another via the addition of CO2. Note that you are adding mass to the system & that mass has to go somewhere – so it is going to fill the pore space & reduce the permeability. My guess is that you would quickly reduce your perm with the creation of limestone to the point where you couldn’t inject any more CO2, rendering the concept & project useless. Basalts, in general, do not have well connected pore spaces. They have locally good permeability along joints (cooling surfaces) and fractures, but this permeability is in general quite ineffective at connecting up the bulk of the pore space. If you cant hook up your pore space, you have no place to put the extra mass (CO2) & you reduce your good permeability quickly. I would like to see a mass balance on their calculations. My initial reaction, even if permeability blocking isn’t a problem that there is not enough connected pore space that can be accessed to accommodate all the CO2 they propose putting into the ground.
Assuming the technology was proven (injection & chemical sequestration in basalt) , what might the costs be? Note that in the original paper, the proposal is to inject the CO2 as a liquid – it takes a whole lot of energy to liquify & pump that CO2 away. I would also like to see the energy requirements of these operations & how much CO2 that produces – that will reduce the net CO2 reductions, potentially significantly. What about the cost of drilling the 1000’s of wells & associated facilities needed to use the whole basin for sequestration? If they go offshore as proposed in the article, they can easily figure on a net $20-40 million per well – for drilling & facilities. For a 1000 wells, that would be 20-40 billion dollars. Not exactly cheap – and of course we still haven’t added in the operating expenses – energy, maintenance, personnel, etc to run such a scheme. I think if you add it all up, the costs per unit CO2 per btu of power generated would be astronomical, even if it were technically feasible.
On that note, I will leave it to others why we don’t even need sequestration to start with (I would start with talking about how miniscule this is in the over all carbon budget of the Earth, followed by how the evidence for CO2 based catastrophic warming is extremely poor, etc etc)
The idea of chemical sequestration is interesting academically, but it is hard to see this ever being done in a practical setting.
Gary P (18:58:25) :
Great, the real threat is a cold trend, short growing seasons, famine in the poorer countries and these guys want to bury plant food.
I beginning to understand how the last time the sun went passive and the crops failed, people began to burn witches. I have a couple scapegoats in mind. How are we going to find the wood for the fire under all this snow?
According to Monty Python witches are made of wood since like wood they burn. Since according to Python ducks float like wood then surely ducks burn if you dry them out, therefore all you need is a couple of ducks to use as kindling.
They will be about as useful as this study.
This is not about CO2. None of these people could care a whit about CO2. Since it is an invisible gas, the public can be bamboozled (trust us, folks, we are piping CO2 to protect the children) for as long as they want this caper to run.
I don’t believe our technology is currently adequate to safely sequester CO2 even if we wanted to. Years ago I was a roughneck on natural gas well rigs, including what they refer to as hydrogen sulfide wells. Those contain high percentages of H2S, and accidental releases were deadly to all life in the area.
I would think there would be significant risks associated with gathering quantities of CO2 on a scale that would make an impact, as well as with putting the CO2 back into ground and containing it there.
As earlier posters imply, I can’t see anyone initially agreeing to have the CO2 sequestration source in their backyard (NIMBY), although an accidental release may be less significant than a release at a nuclear power plant, which most of us have accepted as a tolerable risk.
A bit off topic, does anyone know why Cryosphere Today went to 2-year comparison chart for the Northern and Southern hemispheres as shown on their website today? Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere.
It’s simple, CO2 cannot act as a greenhouse, it’s effect is nearly exhausted as a heat retention augmenter, and it was much higher even as recently as the 1940s (440-550 ppm). Why is the direct chemical data ignored so religiously?
Burying CO2 is just plain dumb, but it makes jobs at the expense of the citizens as the cost of all of this unnecessary work is passed on to the consumer.