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.
Who cares about co2 storage?! CO2 is not an issue. Let’s not be sidetracked by climate alarmists.
OT but Joe Romm is denigrating Joe the Bastardi over at his Climate Puke website. You couldn’t write this stuff (though it actually has been written), I think that it is time to redefine who the real “denialists” are.
I wish that little lisping balding pussy would allow some comments through other than the 50 buddy’s he has. But then that would be a real discussion, and you know he doesn’t want to be anything like WUWT!
Steve Keohane (19:33:21) :
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
Hawaii has the very same problem. A basaltic soil that will grow practically anything. Hell, if you throw a tomato down on the ground, you will have a tomato plant within the year. And they are warmer by about 20 degrees than the globe is. Does anyone think that they need a cooler climate?
If anyone is a true AGW believer, then I challenge you to head north for your holiday during the next winter.
Any state that sequesters CO2 shouldn’t get food shipped in from other states. It’s as simple as that. If they’re depleting the atmosphere of plant food by sequestering it in their stupid rock formations, let them figure out how to feed themselves. Greedy plant food sequesterers.
government funded research to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
solution to be government subsidised.
i feel like the last investor in a ponzi scheme, again.
I think we ought to spend 2 trillion dollars for rest stops for space aliens which makes as much sense as co2 burying. No one has proven that co2 causes a rise in earth’s temp.
If today was April 1, we could all have a good laugh.
While it offers its requisite salute to climate change, here is an interesting podcast interview of Dr. Jureg Matter on a similar study project in Iceland which uses basalt to capture CO2 as precipitates:
http://www.earthsky.org/interviewpost/energy/juerg-matter-on-icelands-new-carbon-storage-project
My fellow New Jerseyians have already just about banned all garbage disposal and garbage incinerators in the state. New York City closed the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, to much cheering and applause. These pseudoenvironmentalists think they are saving the environment by trucking their refuse to PA, WV, and OH.
Try driving along Route 80 or the PA Turnpike at any time of the day or night.
You will see an endless stream of 22 ton refuse tractor trailers going back and forth from NJ and NYC to the landfills, 200 miles away.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of all that burned diesel fuel is?
I read one estimate that the garbage transfer consumes 10% of the area’s diesel fuel.
Madness…
Also in my country a number of craps have long been twittering on the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), but that is no more a means of job creation ふby bureaucrats, for whom the most important target is drawing a huge amount of money from Ministry of Finance. The outcome of new projects is none of their concerns…………….
Visiting Mammoth Lakes in CA a few years ago, I observed and area of dying trees and signs posted warning tourists to stay clear of a very specific area where there was danger of asphyxiation from CO2 seepage. Caveat emptor….
This idea has a very lucrative benefit. In the distant future, there will be very little humor, as entropy will have removed the energy from humorous things. Archeologists will uncovered theses projects and humor will be infused with energy once again as a loud cry goes up:” [snip] were those idiots thinking? “
wherever u look, it’s money, money, money….
Climate Audit has mentioned Tim Profeta a couple of times, as he was copied in an email to ‘the team’ when he was in Joe Lieberman’s office dealing with AGW.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=376&filename=1067194064.txt
amusingly, profeta founded an oil & gas exploration company called Captiva Resources Inc, which has Prof Stephen Schneider as a Director:
http://www.spoke.com/info/c6SU5h1/CaptivaResourcesInc
and interestingly, Tim Profeta has a three-page profile here that is well worth reading:
Duke Magazine:Pragmatic Problem Solver
Volume 95, No.6, November-December 2009
Tim Profeta, comfortable among scholars and respected within Capitol culture, brings a sure hand to the delicate task of inserting good environmental research into the national legislative discourse
by Barry Yeoman
Tim Profeta M.E.M. ’97, J.D. ’97, director of Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions…
Duke had a joint program offering a law degree and master’s of environmental management; it seemed like a good match.
Profeta found the two degree programs “cross-fertilizing,” he says. “When my law-school classmates’ eyes were glazing over on the seventeenth acronym of environmental law, I was interested because I understood the economics and the science that underlay those laws.” After he graduated in 1997, he practiced law and clerked for a judge before accepting a position as the environmental counsel to Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut….
Before he leaves for a private dinner with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu Hon. ’06, Profeta sits down with Maggie Fox, the new president of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit founded by former Vice President Al Gore. They chat in the lobby of Washington’s St. Regis Hotel, under Italian Renaissance chandeliers, about some of the impediments to climate legislation. One is the resistance of lawmakers from poorer districts. This week, Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, has fretted aloud that cap-and-trade would raise the price of everything from gasoline to toys. “For a low-income family, it’s absolutely impossible for them to absorb the costs,” he told reporters.
Fox suggests that what’s needed are “state laboratories,” small-scale experiments focused on reducing carbon emissions without burdening the poor. “What you need to say to Butterfield is, ‘Let’s sign up your district today,’ ” she tells Profeta. “Let’s pick twenty-five districts, because there’s a big difference between a low-income district in North Carolina and one in Montana.”…
As he moves through Washington, talking with everyone from Congressional aides to Secretary Chu, Profeta remains nearly invisible to outsiders. He received just two mentions in major U.S. newspapers during the first nine months of 2009. Yet those who work with him say his imprint is ubiquitous. “I call Tim the marionette master,” says one Senate staffer. “He controls all the puppets.”…
Profeta acknowledges that the current bill is “rife with imperfections because of politics.” Ever the pragmatist, he doesn’t let these shortcomings slow him down. “I don’t really reflect,” he says. “I just keep riding the boat down the river.”
(Yeoman is a freelance journalist whose work appears in Audubon, AARP The Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine)
http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/111209/solver1.html
there has been a new carbon sink just formed in the antarctic thanks to internation cooporation between the Japanese and the anti whaling campaigners
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/08/2788203.htm
The only way to put a stop to this nonsense is to elect people to government who will stop funding it.
In the meantime, we need some bumper stickers:
“CO2 IS GOOD FOR PLANTS, GOOD FOR THE EARTH, AND GOOD FOR YOU!”
/Mr Lynn
As has been said here many times and in many ways, history will be the judge. In the meantime, unfortunately for us all, despite common sense truth screaming in their faces, they are set to go through with this nonsense. This is not only the first wildcat scheme we will be hearing about and public money is about to be squandered. The only hope is that the time delay needed to implement these mindless actions will be longer than that needed to set all the coming investigations and legal actions in motion, but at present they have brainwashed the young public and demonised sceptics to such an extent, it will be an uphill struggle and the same triangular strife as we witnessed in Copenhagen.
If NAS scientists knew anything about CO2, they would know that it exists inside the Earth and has existed there for billions of years under very high pressure as a fluid inside the Earth’s mantle. It is also gaseous plant food in the natural cycle of plant/animal life.
The decay products of extinct Pu-244 and I-129 are in CO2 that is still trapped inside the Earth. They have been there since the Earth formed about 4.6 Gyr (4.6 x 10^9 years) ago.
These decay product on extinct elements were first observed in CO2 gas wells that are used to make Dry Ice in the state of New Mexico [“The xenon record of extinct radioactivities in the Earth,” Science 174 (1971) 1334-1336].
The same decay products of extinct elements were later observed in fluid inclusions of CO2 in an olivine xenothlith that was brought to the Earth surface in an Hawaiian volcano [ “Noble gases in an Hawaiian xenolith”, Nature 257, 778-780 (1975)].
What a crazy world where NAS fails to meet its responsibility to speak out on fraudulent CO2-induced global warming and then joins the charade by agreeing to publish methods to bury CO2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Will India and China also send us their CO2 to bury?
That’s my opinion,
Oliver K. Manuel
photon without a Higgs (19:11:27) :
Yes but your first link has Roswell with a new high of 77°.
Can we at last blame aliens?
Since both sets of satellite data for Dec 09 are now available, I thought that I might update their trend data, just to see what it looks like. Here it is for the last 12 years.
http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2010/01/twelve-year-satellite-temperature.html
If anyone were really serious about carbon sequestration, we would stop recycling paper and cardboard and bury it all in landfills. Trees grow most rapidly when they’re young so it makes sense, in a Swiftian way, to make all your paper products from young trees, replant them and bury the paper products. A well constructed land fill stays dry enough once sealed that there’s not much methane. What there is could be captured.
Another possibility is to turn the wood into charcoal, collect the volatiles for fuel (that’s how methanol used to be made, it’s also known as wood alcohol) and other uses and bury the charcoal (or add it to soil ). I’m almost half serious here, although my tongue is definitely in the vicinity of my cheek.
The Man-Made Global warming Scam is all about stealing money from the sheeple.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the major reasons for promoting the fraud of man-made global warming. Billions of tax payer dollars are now being spent to make a select few filthy rich from this useless technology. Senator John D Rockefeller is the major player behind this scam.
Rockefeller is a longtime champion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Earlier this year, he helped secure $3.4 billion for the Fossil Energy Research and Development programs, including CCS research, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=317677&
In the UK there was a ‘Horizon’ program some years ago about the ‘black earth’ of South America. Normally soil there is very poor but the ‘black earth’ is possibly the most fertile soil on Earth. Analysis showed it contained up to 80% of charcoal or char.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of years ago the Indians had added charcoal to their soil and made it permanently fertile. The charcoal appears to hold in the nutrients. The scientist on the program was doing plant tests by adding charcoal to soil and using less fertiliser but getting far better growth.
If it does promote plant growth then there is commercial reason to apply it on a global scale – obviously the Amazon, possibly the Steppes of Russia, the American wheat belt, everywhere! Also, if it promotes plant growth it will remove even more carbon from the atmosphere. If some of this extra growth is put back in to the soil as charcoal then it becomes a virtuous circle.
In fact if charcoal is beneficial then it may be better to convert organic waste to charcoal than compost it as composting produces methane.
It has the advantage that it can be done on any scale. I think the simplest recipe is one third each of charcoal, cow manure and earth.
Certainly this is the only rational way I know to remove carbon from the atmosphere as it could actually be beneficial.
Is this proposal for real? I can’t believe it.
Considering the obscurity of purpose, magnitude of costs and difficulty of execution…
Why don’t we just start building pyramids again?
This is a seriously stupid idea…….no comment I can make will put this insanity into it’s proper context