It was a tenth of that, 100,000 tons, that caused the Lake Nyos disaster
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
7000 ft below the city of Decatur, Illinois, population 74,710 people, is a high pressure reservoir which contains 1 million tons of CO2.
From the press release:
One of the largest carbon sequestration projects in the U.S., the Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP) has reached its goal of capturing 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and injecting it deep underground in the Mount Simon Sandstone formation beneath Decatur, Illinois. The project is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of carbon capture and storage. IBDP director Robert Finley talked about the million-ton milestone with News Bureau physical sciences editor Liz Ahlberg. Finley is director of the Advanced Energy Technology Institute at the Illinois State Geological Survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.
The reservoir has been created to demonstrate the viability of carbon sequestration – capturing large quantities on carbon, to prevent the CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.
The University of Illinois scientists responsible for this demonstration project assure us that the reservoir does not pose a safety threat. According to a University of Illinois press release;
“Extensive monitoring takes place during and after injection to be sure the stored CO2 stays in place. Monitoring techniques include using geophysical technology to confirm the position of the CO2 underground and wells to monitor groundwater and soils.
No out-of-bounds health, safety or environmental risks were observed from this properly designed and managed storage site. Appropriate risk mitigation and management plans were an integral part of the overall project planning. Extensive monitoring took place before, during and now after the injection to be sure the CO2 stays in place. The first line of monitoring begins deep below the ground, so we know if any leakage occurs long before any CO2 might reach the surface.”
They’re probably right – when you create a demonstration project, a showpiece for what you hope will become a lucrative business, you want to make sure nothing goes wrong. I’m sure that elaborate precautions have been taken to prevent any possibility of adverse news, in the hope that this reservoir will be the first of many.
However, as the scientists responsible for the project admit, a serious carbon sequestration effort will need to store a lot more than a million tons of CO2. “… One million tons is scalable in its behavior to the 3 million tons that would be emitted annually from a typical medium-sized, coal-fired power plant. …”
If just one of those proposed sequestration projects suffers a major containment breach, say if an earthquake cracks the geological structure, or if a mistake or greed leads to the reservoir being overloaded, the result could be a disaster.
In Africa, in 1986, an abrupt release of an estimated 100,000 – 300,000 tons of CO2 killed 2,500 people up to 25km (15.5 miles) from the source of the release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos#1986_disaster
A similar release near a major city would kill a sizeable fraction of the city’s population. The region of devestation was comparable to the loss of life which would be caused by a large nuclear explosion – the only reason a lot more people didn’t die, was Lake Nyos is a sparsely inhabited rural region.
The Lake Nyos CO2 release was so deadly, because CO2 is heavier than air – when the huge CO2 cloud boiled out of lake Nyos, it hugged the ground, displacing all breathable air to an elevation 10s of ft above ground level, suffocating almost everyone in its path.
Its not just people and animals which would be affected – car engines would also stall, as the blanket of CO2 choked off the supply of oxygen.
If carbon sequestration becomes commonplace, sooner or later someone will get greedy and careless, and will be careless in their choice of geological reservoir, and / or will overload their geological reservoir to boost their bottom line. And that carelessness will, in my opinion, almost inevitably lead to a catastrophic loss of life.
Astonishing hubris, narcissism, arrogance, and ignorance, too. If you have relatives in Decatur, tell them to move asap, or carry O2 on their person at all times. CO2 is heavier than air, that’s why it’s down here and not up there. The CO2 curve that shows atmospheric warming as a function of atmospheric content is convex. It starts out kind of steep, but at some point (like right now) you can add astonishing amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere and the measurable greenhouse effect is negligible. Rather like an upside-down hockey stick. (giggle) Of course you have to completely discount other influences, like the sun, as independent drivers/variables. Oh well. Now we know why AGW has stalled, no?
If we dissolve the CO2 in the ocean it will eventually turn to limestone
Cold water (lakes and oceans), moist soil, and unfrozen biosphere are presently doing plenty of sequestering. Do we really need to spend a lot of money trying to store CO2 underground? Using it as a by-product is another approach. Try pumping it through a forest to make the trees grow faster.
I assume anyone selling real estate in Decatur has to disclose that there is a WMD stored under the city with demonstrated lethality.
I never heard of this silly project. Seriously? 1,000,000 x 1000 kg of CO2 deliberately stored in the earth by people, on purpose? That is a huge amount of CO2. I want to know more about this.
I have to say, how can anyone who works on this take any pride in their pointless work?
As a punishment in military prisons, inmates would have to move a pile of rocks across the yard for a month, then move them back the next month, achieving nothing. The rock of Sisyphus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
Think about the beer brewing industry! I wonder if there are any breweries in Decatur?
The rub is if such an event were to occur the Eco-Terrorists would simply point to it in confirmation of how deadly CO2 is. In typical form, they set up a problem and once it occurs use it to claim they were right all along. There is never any winning here.
Just imagine if every coal powerplant in the US had one of those. A foreign country could pretty much wipe out a large portion of the US population with just a few hundred bunker busters. no nukes, no damage to the infrastructure, just a whole mess of dead bodies to dispose of.
Let’s step back and look at this carefully. This is 100% pure unadulterated alarmism. The point is that carbon sequestration requires the same level of process safety analysis as a major chemical plant or fuel terminal. That is something that can be accomplished. The reason nuclear plants have such an enviable safety record is that they focus on safety from the design of the plant to the culture of the employees.
The real issue here is not the hazards of CO2, but the fact that this facility is completely unnecessary. Even if sequestration was completely safe, it would still be a waste of time.
Omega, I’m not terribly worried (actually, I’m more amused), but there is a non-zero risk here. Decatur isn’t terribly near the New Madrid fault (229 miles) but there has been no large seismic activity for a long time, and the Midwestern plate is very rigid- it transmits seismic waves fairly efficiently. Could the pressure of this carbon capture, combined with significant tremors, cause an escape?
Speculation, I know, but have these “experts” considered all the variables? And if this practice became widespread, where would the danger zones be?
Of course, you are quite right about this being unnecessary and a waste of time and resources.
Would “Gas-X” work. Sorry — this is a try on my part to be humorous, which I’m not very good at.
Actually, it made me chuckle.
Ironically, most of the CO2 that is being sequestered is coming from ADM’s ethanol production facility in Decatur.
Yeah, I saw that, too. One boondoggle on top of another.
Also, Continental Carbonic has a big facility there, too. If you need dry ice (and I mean, a LOT of cry ice), that’s the place to go.
Lee, in order to evaluate the impacts of large-scale injection of CO2 into a geologic formation, you need a large-scale source of CO2. Ethanol production generates CO2 and ADM is able to generate at least 1 million tons CO2 annually so the first large-scale project in the USA can proceed. Statoil’s Sleipner natural gas processing business in Norway has been injecting 1 million tons of CO2 annually for the past 10 years in a geologic formation located under the North Sea. There have been no issues with this project. Statoil injects CO2 in order to avoid paying a CO2 tax.
…1 million tons of CO2 annually for the past 10 years… 18 years 😉
Karen, thanks for your patience explaining the lack of risk to folk here. Saves me having it to it!
so ethanol production is making a lot of CO2? Well, well, well……it is less powerful, costs more, and now adds CO2? what’s not to love about ethanol? (other than the campaign contributions)
Clearly the only big winners in a carbon sequestration project would be silicon-based life forms. You have often asked why the team were so strange. Aliens, it’s worse than we thought.
Gotta love the greens. For decades they have fought against building homes on ridge lines in order to preserve “pristine” landscapes, but now push for thousands of industrial structures (windmills) along the same ridges. For a generation they fought nuclear power on the grounds that the waste persists for a few hundred years, and now they push for in-ground storage of CO2 in deadly quantities…. a danger which will persist forever.
I would say “bless their mess”, except their mess will be our mess once they have thrown up their hands and walked away from the fruits of their ignorance.
I think this should be named “The Nyos Project”. Catchy, huh?
The “progressives” seem to me to be both Malthusian and misanthropic in their views. They probably would see the deaths of thousands of people to be an overall benefit to the economy and to the global environment so sounding this sort of alarm is not likely to influence them. They tend to see the population of the planet as the cause of its problems. What is being pointed out here is more likely to be regarded as a feature rather than a bug by “progressives”.
I have a perfect solution. Sequester the CO2 under the US Capitol building and the capitols of the states who insist on burying their heads a
Ong with CO2. That way when the inevitable disaster occurs, the morons responsible for trying to take life giving CO2 out of the environment will be the first to suffer the consequences of their ignorance.
Given that the opposite of pro is con, what is the opposite of progress?
Ha ha!
I see that this project originated at MIT. Do I hear a Gruber?
Disclaimer: I have worked on CCS (Carbon capture and sequestration) projects, but just because someone payed me to do foolish, non-productive work, does not mean I actually believe it has a useful purpose.
First, we are comparing apples to camels, using CCS in underground storage vs. Lake Nyos.
Lake Nyos was caused by an overturning of water containing CO2. All the CO2 was released at once. There is only one barrier to contain the CO2, and that is pressure. If the pressure above the CO2 laden water is reduced, pressure release becomes self sustaining, and the CO2 is all released. Even a small disturbance would do it, like shaking a bottle of Coke. Even without any disturbance, eventually the CO2 would over saturate the water, form bubbles, and rise. The further the bubbles rise, the bigger they get, and the lower the hydrostatic pressure, which releases more CO2. It would all release at once.
They now have a barge on the lake, that has piping to depths where the CO2 accumulates. The pipe was partially evacuated, and now there is a continuous plume of CO2 and water. This prevents a dangerous build up of CO2. Its a controlled release now, not a sudden overturning. It’s also self powering.
In geological sequestration, there are additional constraints in addition to hydrostatic pressure; permeability restraints and overlying impermeable rock (about 2 km worth).
Even if a new fault opened all the way to surface, along the entire length of the reservoir, you would not get a release of all the CO2. And this scenario is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY.
First, you would still have hydrostatic pressure keeping the CO2 in control. A properly designed CCS would not have an over pressured system (over hydrostatic gradient). Next, due to pressure loss through permeability, the rate that gas can escape is reduced. As the fracture is not propped open, and the two fracture faces are still in contact, the friction losses moving up the fracture would reduce the rate of gas escaping.
But first you still have to remove the hydrostatic pressure over the CO2. As long as the hydrostatic pressure is in place, even if the rock overburden is breached, the CO2 will be immobile.
Lets do the math. Assuming a 1 km x 1 km storage area, and in the EXTREMELY UNLIKELY event of a new fracture opening all the way to surface with a width of 1 mm x 1 km long, you have 1/1,000,000 of the reservoir exposed. Remember Lake Nyos in effect had the entire surface area of the lake release CO2 at the same time. In the CCS case, you have only a very small proportion of the reservoir exposed. The rate of release will be constrained by the reservoir permeability and the permeability of the 2 km fracture to surface. In this given case, even if you have no pressure losses due to permeability contrasts, you will still need several million minutes to release all the gas in CCS, compared to Lake Nyos. Nyos released all the gas in several minutes, and the CCS reservoir exposed is a million times smaller, at least.
Nature does have examples of gas leaking to surface from deeper reservoirs. Google “burning springs”. The US alone has 1/2 dozen or so. A pathway has opened from the gas reservoir to surface, and gas is escaping. The natural gas is then ignited by lightening or a poorly chosen spot for a campfire. The flames are candle sized, up to that of small campfire. In other words, not much gas is escaping.
The only way to release all the CCS gas at once, is to remove all the rock overburden at once. In other words, an asteroid strike or a Yellowstone type super volcano. I suspect that we would not be that worried by the release of the gas, as the other effects would be more problematic.
That is not to say that there are not dangers. A blow out of a well will be dangerous out to no more than several hundred meters. Even H2S well blowouts, usually have exclusion zones of only a few hundred meters, and H2S is hundreds of times (1000s?) more toxic than CO2.
Its possible that CO2 could leak into the lake, and build up over time. But reservoir monitoring, and measuring lake CO2 levels, would reveal this before it became a problem.
In conclusion, while geological CCS is simply political posturing and serves no useful purpose, it is also no more dangerous than any other application of geological engineering. To compare it to Lake Nyos is simply not applicable, and is only fear mongering. In fact, it is exactly the type fear mongering used by proponents of AGW over the same gas, CO2.
By all means, oppose CCS, but for the waste of money it actually is, not for any imaginary dangers it poses.
Thanks, Les, for your clear and informative input. I wasn’t worried anyway- except for the wasting money and effort part…
Unless somebody blows up the well head.
Or you simply need a slow leak into Lake Decatur that goes completely unnoticed as the CO2 content of the water increases and become saturated. Then comes the normal seasonal overturning of the lake water and BAM! all of that CO2 stored in that water is suddenly released all at once.
Yes, I had mentioned the possibility of a leak into the lake, and as I said, the aquifers around CCS would be monitored, including lakes. Any leak would be seen on a real time basis, well before it became dangerous.
Any build up can be easily mitigated, as shown in the Lake Nyos example. Any observed leak that could not be shut off, would also render the reservoir unusable, and injection would need to stop.
And said one Simpson to the other, AND YOU PAID WHAT FOR THAT HOUSE !!!
I suggest we leave scaring with the boogeyman to the others. Just as fracking has negligible direct environmental impact if executed properly so has CO2 Storage. The Lake Nyos incident cant be repeated from an underground reservoir under km’s/miles of rock. It’s not safety but cost-benefit that makes CCS such a bad idea.
If CO2 is a problem CCS come way down on the list of means to adress it.
There is very little danger of catastrophic release of CO2 from these reservoirs.
It will act to dissolve subsurface carbonates, I’m more concerned about that.
No, CO2 in salt water actually FORMS carbonates. That is one of the supposed selling points of CCS. Over geological time, it transforms the CO2 from a gas to a solid.
In any case, it would not usually be placed in carbonate reservoirs, or even sandstones with high carbonate cementing of the silica.
No, no it does not. Mineral trapping, what you’re referring to, is a minor process in CO2 injection. 10,000 years. There is net host rock dissolution from the dissolving of CO2 in carbonate aquifers. The only way it is important is that it can actually increase the integrity of the cap rock.
If CO2 injection into salt water resulted in a net precipitation of minerals than many oil and gas fields would have been damaged by the process. The porosity and permeability in the CO2 injection formations would be damaged.
http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/233/1/59.short
https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/310067.pdf
http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/233/1/59.short
P.S. many proposed CCS formations are in carbonate formations.
P.S.S. Third sentence should read that “There is models that suggest the process could be slightly more significant after 10,000 years but there is observational evidence that the process is even slower.”
Robert: Note my use of “over geological time”. There will be little effect over the lifetime of the producing wells. That said, scaling of wells is a common problems, but is not usually due to CO2 effects, but more to pressure drops and incompatible fluids.
While I agree that there will be a net dissolution of carbonates with CO2 water, it will be a minor effect, and centered mostly around the injection wellbore. Over geologic time, in combination with Mg and Ca, there will be a net INCREASE in carbonates in the reservoir.
Most CCS is in sandstone. The few trials in carbonates are in the Middle East, because most of the ME is carbonate. They are also mostly tertiary recovery programs. Carbonates are poor choices for CCS, as they are prone to natural fractures and vugs. They are also inhomogeneous in permeability and porosity. Homogeneity is something that is more suited to CCS.
[“vugs” ??? .mod]
There is a CCS project in the Arbuckle Group of the Wellington Oil Field in Kansas. Perhaps they have determined that it’s not well suited, I haven’t followed it too closely.
Thanks, I was not aware of the Kansas work. My initial look:
1. Its a dolomite, and thus about 20 times more resistant to acid than CaCH3 at low temps.
2. Its has a good cap rock in the Chatanooga Shale above it.
3. Initially, they want to use CO2 injection in the oil zones above the saline aquifer.
4. From this summary:
http://www.recovery.gov/arra/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIdSur=122838
However, residual gas saturation and long-term mineralization in saline aquifers should also sequester significant and comparable tonnage of CO2.
My emphasis.
5. This has a good overview, especially on the pressure management to prevent leaks.
http://www.kgs.ku.edu/PRS/Ozark/Reports/2014/MGWA_2014_Arbuckle_Freshwater_Aquifers_TBirdie.pdf
Vug: a term in a song by The Duke of Ook. “What kind of a Vug are you?”. Mostly The Duke sings about apes.
The point being, the “potential” dangers of their supposed “mitigation” are just as bad, if not worse, than the potential dangers that they are mitigating.
In the future, ADM will tap into the CO2 reserve for the greenhouses to grow food when NAH gets cold.
Perhaps they hope to construct a subterranean biome. Why else would they sequester a key nutrient for life processes below ground?
And one must ask, how many of these time bombs (of this size) would you need to have to drop the atmospheric CO2 ppm by even 1or 2 ppm !!