From the “MTBE is perfectly safe department” and Duke University:
Leaking underground CO2 storage could contaminate drinking water
DURHAM, N.C. — Leaks from carbon dioxide injected deep underground to help fight climate change could bubble up into drinking water aquifers near the surface, driving up levels of contaminants in the water tenfold or more in some places, according to a study by Duke University scientists.
Based on a year-long analysis of core samples from four drinking water aquifers, “We found the potential for contamination is real, but there are ways to avoid or reduce the risk,” says Robert B. Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change and professor of biology at Duke.
“Geologic criteria that we identified in the study can help identify locations around the country that should be monitored or avoided,” he says. “By no means would all sites be susceptible to problems of water quality.”
The study appears in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es102235w.
Storing carbon dioxide deep below Earth’s surface, a process known as geosequestration, is part of a suite of new carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies being developed by governments and industries worldwide to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions entering Earth’s atmosphere. The still-evolving technologies are designed to capture and compress CO2, emissions at their source – typically power plants and other industrial facilities – and transport the CO2 to locations where it can be injected far below the Earth’s surface for long-term storage. The U.S. Department of Energy, working with industry and academia, has begun the planning for at least seven regional CCS projects.
“The fear of drinking water contamination from CO2 leaks is one of several sticking points about CCS and has contributed to local opposition to it,” says Jackson, who directs Duke’s Center on Global Change. “We examined the idea that if CO2 leaked out slowly from deep formations, where might it negatively impact freshwater aquifers near the surface, and why.”
Jackson and his postdoctoral fellow Mark G. Little collected core samples from four freshwater aquifers around the nation that overlie potential CCS sites and incubated the samples in their lab at Duke for a year, with CO2 bubbling through them.
After a year’s exposure to the CO2, analysis of the samples showed that “there are a number of potential sites where CO2 leaks drive contaminants up tenfold or more, in some cases to levels above the maximum contaminant loads set by the EPA for potable water,” Jackson says. Three key factors – solid-phase metal mobility, carbonate buffering capacity and electron exchanges in the overlying freshwater aquifer – were found to influence the risk of drinking water contamination from underground carbon leaks.
The study also identified four markers that scientists can use to test for early warnings of potential carbon dioxide leaks. “Along with changes in carbonate concentration and acidity of the water, concentrations of manganese, iron and calcium could all be used as geochemical markers of a leak, as their concentration increase within two weeks of exposure to CO2,” Jackson says.
Tell them to please leave us alone. 🙁
Every time it is more “funny”each new argument which appears. This time some nuts will manufacture “Subterranean Coke”…
However, now some progressive people are really preoccupied and don´t like this “solution”, as they used to drink their favorite beverage (*) totally degasified.
(*)KA
Another “bright idea” bites the dust. There’s no stopping the mad dash to a mannmade better world. Of course it would be a little easier and less expensive if people would reduce the size of their urban footprints on the planet and start growing more trees instead of suburban homes, industrial parks, and landfills. But no, that’s too easy.
PS: I still think that it would be better if we all moved to California and let the rest of the country go to trees and sagebrush. Yes! I’ve thought of the problem with earthquakes in that state. We can fill up the faults with garbage and human/industrial waste; that will glue everything together in 50 years.
JerryF says:
November 11, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Brilliant! Sounds as reasonable – nay, more reasonable – as any of the CO2 sequestering schemes I’ve seen. Your plan covers all the bases; politics, religion, economics.
When are you going to apply for a grant for a pilot project?
It seems that everything is going wrong for the alarmists:
The oceans are not warming, but cooling a bit.
The atmosphere has stopped warming in 1998
The hockey stick got stuck on the horizontal section.
Biofuels have been found more damning than coal itself (read it just yesterday in an EU report)
Climategate
Amazongate
Glaciergate
Himalayangate
Pachauri (enough said)
Offshore wind trubines UK project may flop due to immense costs
Calls for Obama to sack his Climate Czar Carol Browner http://cei.org/news-releases/obama-must-fire-climate-czar-carol-browner
Planet has enough hydrocarbon fuels for the next 300 years at least
And now this: CO2 sequestration is dangerous
What else?
Iskandar says:
November 12, 2010 at 4:22 am
……CSS is not a mature technology.
Agreed. It is an immature technology from immature people. I had seen this coming the first time I heard about it. (I dodnt like saying ‘I told you so’, but I couldn’t help it) It’s like pumping air into a punctured tyre, just a little bit complex though. How can one tell to all that pressurised CO2 to stay down there? for a millenium or two? Fix a sign saying: NO EXIT HERE? lol
This was a stupid, expensive, and ineffective solution so of course the Greenies embraced it wholeheartedly.
Oh, did I mention unnecessary?
What if a multiple-decade’s worth of CO2 pumped into the earth’s crust were to escape, by some freak of Nature (or Man), in a very short span of time? Wouldn’t it be much much worse both at the micro and macro scale? It would surely suffocate any beast or humans in the immediate vicinity (remember the Cameroon accident way back in the eightees was it?) and it will cause a sudden jump in global atmospheric CO2 that would cause unprecedented warming…. with AlGorean-tipping-point-global-disruptions.
Seems they have finally twigged that more CO2 helps trees grow not dissappear. So why stick it underground.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/11/climate-change-forests-water-amazon
In the UK the CCS lunatics strike again;
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said:
“Today the Government is reasserting its mission to lead the world on CCS, by opening our funding process to what could be one of the first ever commercial-scale CCS projects on a gas-fired plant in the world.”
“The UK looks set to rely on gas for years to come. We won’t be able to take the carbon out of all gas plants overnight, but we hope to support the process by investment in new technology now. In the long run carbon capture will help provide us with a secure and affordable energy system and we want to encourage companies with projects on both gas and coal-fired power stations to come forward.”
see http://tinyurl.com/36yk69x
Thin end of wedge here – the next announcement will be that you cannot get a permit for a new gas fired power station unless it can accomodate CCS – as is now the case for new coal fired power stations in the UK since the passing of the Climate Change Bill in October 2008.
Neil Jones says:
November 11, 2010 at 11:13 pm. Couldn’t we pump the CO2 into oil wells to get more oil out at the same time?
Yes we can, but the problem is that the one of the products of burning oil is CO2 gas which would occupy a volume of an order of magnitude or two higher (I i m too lazy to compute the math), so a small part of that CO2 would go back to where it came from, but the other greater portion of CO2 gas would still be looking around for a resting place… maybe a rain forest or two would do.
[From the ideal gas laws, PV=nRT. But you will need that CO2 compressed up to 3000 – 6000 psig (from atmospheric, hot gas conditions in an exhaust stack) and cooled back to ambient, then shipped cross-country at those high pressures, then injected back into the bottom of the well. Robt]
Many of the problems referred to above have been investigated by UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in 2009.
This is a good read and shows that CCS is unlikely to proceed in Europe because of the way in which financial liabilities for accidents and leaks are dealt with.
see: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn335.pdf
Brownedoff says:
November 12, 2010 at 4:17 am
“Do you agree that your analogy is faulty?”
No, I don’t.
Reservoirs are reservoirs, oil or no oil. Top seals are top seals, oil or no oil
This is concept is child’s play for any petroleum reservoir engineer.
Find the right reservoirs with the right properties – of which there are unlimited numbers of – and start injecting. If you can do it into an oil reservoir & get economic benefit from it , all the better. Of course, this all costs $s, but the cost-benefit curve of this operation is not what the article is about & will not debate it.
Again, as I said before – try to separate the concept on CO2 injection from AGW. They are two completely independent concepts. I would agree that AGW is a flawed hypothesis but don’t try to argue it by saying CO2 injection is a flawed hypothesis as it has been done & is being done without issue as we speak.
Contaminated with CO2 leaks? Oh no! Carbonated water! run for the hills! Or the brewery.
Rick Werme,
“I have no idea of the energy requirements behind it, but I sometimes suggest it be combined with sand, i.e. CO2 + SiO2 = SiC + 2O2, i.e. ceramic and oxygen.”
As a former technician in the semiconductor industry, I can assure the energy requirements are very high!
Decaffinated, diet, decarbonated drinks – isn’t this just drinking murky water?
Why get rid of good usable carbon dioxide?
Why go to all that trouble of extracting CO2 from seawater?
Find or build a coal electric plant, which tend to get placed near abundant water sources for cooling purposes, and build a hydrocarbon plant next to it, or build a unified plant. Capture the CO2 from the coal plant exhaust, use some of the electricity to crack hydrogen from the water, use the coal plant’s waste heat in the process described above…
Voila! Burn coal, get electricity and sulfur-free hydrocarbons. The combined operation’s waste will be ash, sulfurous products that are normally scrubbed out anyway… And Oxygen! What’s wrong with that?
(I can hear a million Greens screaming “That’s EVIL COAL! Nothing good comes from it!”)
I have an air conditioning background. Usually, to conserve energy, we admit as little outside air to any system as is feasible, whilst still keeping indoor air quality OK. We get quite excited when providing air conditioning to accommodate machinery (computers, textiles) with their great heat loads, because those machines have little if any requirement for outside air. The other day I had reason to check up on agricultural growth chambers and thought “no requirement for outside air here”! How wrong I was. Those confounded plants in their growth chambers use up the available CO2 because of their unreasonable photosynthesis needs, and outside air must be introduced solely because of its content of CO2 in order that plant growth may be maintained. But many seem to find it difficult to declare that the enemy might indeed be a friend.
Geoff Alder
Thanks Robt for working out the math for lazy me, but the result was converted, by some freak bout of internetitis, into a telephone number preceded with my tiny country’s prefix (tiny is for the island not for the prefix). So, I appeal to all you readers not to press this number because at 3000-6000 psig it may explode in your face and the CO2 may suffocate you. 🙂
Has anyone had a sneaking suspicion that this is a red herring? Can someone do some research, perhaps utilizing FOIA or other means, to find out what the connection is among the “scientists” at Duke and those of the warm-earth cult? I guarantee they are one and the same.
“Let’s try to distract them with this absurdity, so our “peer” buddies can come along and debunk it, since we are so much smarter than they are, we can surely pull it off.”
In one South Park episode, this was called the “Chewbaka Defense” in mockery of the OJ Simpson trial. The lawyer would have a monkey hand puppet while talking to the jury, while spouting total nonsense and saying, “look at the monkey—look at the crazy monkey!” At that, Cartman cried, “Oh no! He’s using the Chewbaka Defense!”
Juraj V. says:
November 11, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I think acidifying of water leads to increased solubility of other minerals /like metals/ in the water. CO2 itself is not a contaminant in this sense.
——-
REPLY:
Right on the money! Groundwater supplies tend to migrate, and deep basaltic aquifers contain elevated levels of metals, radionuclides such as uranium & radium etc. naturally. This is a huge problem in northern Illinois, where deep basaltic reservoirs are increasingly being tapped to supplement overstretched surface water supplies.
The paper says this:
“CO2 caused concentrations of the alkali and alkaline earths and manganese, cobalt, nickel, and iron to increase by more than 2 orders of magnitude. Potentially dangerous uranium and barium increased throughout the entire experiment in some samples.”
The chemical process is through acidification, wherein the carbon dioxide dissolves into the groundater and forms carbonic acid under pressure. The increased acidity causes increased dissolution of minerals from the rock, contaminating the water.
Anyone within DOE who says this is not a problem is an idiot. The public health community is aware of this, but keeping their yaps shut, since they have bought into the public health threats of climate disruption.
….I’m not terribly popular with my colleagues by the way! I keep bringing up these “wicked problems.” We haven’t even addressed the parasitic energy load required to collect, compress and inject the carbon dioxide into these subsurface structures. I’m working with one major utility on all of these aspects of CCS (carbon capture & sequestration).
Thanks, Anthony, this is a good paper. I can penetrate the paywall and obtain the pdfs of these things, why don’t you set up a SCRIBD account for WUWT readers to upload documents such as this?
Here’s another article that seems to substantiate the deleterious effects of carbon dioxide capture and sequestration upon groundwater supplies:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es100559j
Abstract:
Geologic carbon sequestration has the potential to cause long-term reductions in global emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Safe and effective application of carbon sequestration technology requires an understanding of the potential risks to the quality of underground sources of drinking water.
In particular, concern is warranted regarding the potential for CO2 leakage through geological features and abandoned wells that may result in detrimental perturbations to subsurface geochemistry. Reaction path and kinetic models indicate that geochemical shifts caused by CO2 leakage are closely linked to mineralogical properties of the receiving aquifer.
CO2 gas dissolution into groundwater and subsequent reaction with aquifer minerals will control the evolution of pH−bicarbonate envelopes. These parameters provide geochemical context for predicting how regulated contaminants associated with aquifer solids will respond via various mineral−water reaction processes. The distribution and abundance of carbonate, silicate, oxide, and phyllosilicate minerals are identified as key variables in controlling changes in groundwater geochemistry.
Site-specific risk assessments may require characterization of aquifer geology, mineralogy, and groundwater chemistry prior to CO2 injection. Model results also provide a frame of reference for developing indicative measurement, monitoring, and verification (MMV) protocols for groundwater protection.
I remain singularly impressed by Green Logic.
1. For many months we have been warned about “ocean acidification” due to excess CO2 being absorbed by ocean water, where minerals will be leached from corals and shells plus there will be increased corrosion of metals, thus we need to stop releasing such large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
2. It is now a good idea to pump large amounts of excess CO2 underground, where there is water, that may absorb the CO2 and become acidified, which will lead to minerals being leached out of the surrounding rock into the water, contaminating it.
How did they not see that in-ground CO2 sequestration could have this problem, after all those many many months of studying and researching ocean acidification?
The importance of CO2 to health and it’s effect on our system. It plays an important role in nearly every body function.
http://www.breathing.com/articles/carbon-dioxide.htm
Interesting to note that when measuring CO2 blood levels, atmospheric CO2 is not factored in or taken into account because “atmospheric levels are so small, that the result has nil effect on the results.”
I would suggest to SEQUESTER, as they are made up from NOXIOUS CARBON, the majority of Global Warmers, so we will live forever Happy.
Call YOUR FAVORITE undertaker!