From the don’t store it in a fault zone department and the UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Study of natural-occurring 100,000 year-old CO2 reservoirs shows no significant corroding of ‘cap rock’, suggesting the greenhouse gas hasn’t leaked back out – one of the main concerns with greenhouse gas reduction proposal of carbon capture and storage.
New research shows that natural accumulations of carbon dioxide (CO2) that have been trapped underground for around 100,000 years have not significantly corroded the rocks above, suggesting that storing CO2 in reservoirs deep underground is much safer and more predictable over long periods of time than previously thought.
These findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate the viability of a process called carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a solution to reducing carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power stations, say researchers.
CCS involves capturing the carbon dioxide produced at power stations, compressing it, and pumping it into reservoirs in the rock more than a kilometre underground.
The CO2 must remain buried for at least 10,000 years to avoid the impacts on climate. One concern is that the dilute acid, formed when the stored CO2 dissolves in water present in the reservoir rocks, might corrode the rocks above and let the CO2 escape upwards.
By studying a natural reservoir in Utah, USA, where CO2 released from deeper formations has been trapped for around 100,000 years, a Cambridge-led research team has now shown that CO2 can be securely stored underground for far longer than the 10,000 years needed to avoid climatic impacts.
Their new study shows that the critical component in geological carbon storage, the relatively impermeable layer of “cap rock” that retains the CO2, can resist corrosion from CO2-saturated water for at least 100,000 years.
“Carbon capture and storage is seen as essential technology if the UK is to meet its climate change targets,” says lead author Professor Mike Bickle, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Cambridge.
“A major obstacle to the implementation of CCS is the uncertainty over the long-term fate of the CO2 which impacts regulation, insurance, and who assumes the responsibility for maintaining CO2 storage sites. Our study demonstrates that geological carbon storage can be safe and predictable over many hundreds of thousands of years.”
The key component in the safety of geological storage of CO2 is an impermeable cap rock over the porous reservoir in which the CO2 is stored. Although the CO2 will be injected as a dense fluid, it is still less dense than the brines originally filling the pores in the reservoir sandstones, and will rise until trapped by the relatively impermeable cap rocks.
“Some earlier studies, using computer simulations and laboratory experiments, have suggested that these cap rocks might be progressively corroded by the CO2-charged brines, formed as CO2 dissolves, creating weaker and more permeable layers of rock several metres thick and jeopardising the secure retention of the CO2,” explains Bickle.
“However, these studies were either carried out in the laboratory over short timescales or based on theoretical models. Predicting the behaviour of CO2 stored underground is best achieved by studying natural CO2 accumulations that have been retained for periods comparable to those needed for effective storage.”
To better understand these effects, this study, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, examined a natural reservoir where large natural pockets of CO2 have been trapped in sedimentary rocks for hundreds of thousands of years. Sponsored by Shell, the team drilled deep down below the surface into one of these natural CO2 reservoirs to recover samples of the rock layers and the fluids confined in the rock pores.
The team studied the corrosion of the minerals comprising the rock by the acidic carbonated water, and how this has affected the ability of the cap rock to act as an effective trap over geological periods of time. Their analysis studied the mineralogy and geochemistry of cap rock and included bombarding samples of the rock with neutrons at a facility in Germany to better understand any changes that may have occurred in the pore structure and permeability of the cap rock.
They found that the CO2 had very little impact on corrosion of the minerals in the cap rock, with corrosion limited to a layer only 7cm thick. This is considerably less than the amount of corrosion predicted in some earlier studies, which suggested that this layer might be many metres thick.
The researchers also used computer simulations, calibrated with data collected from the rock samples, to show that this layer took at least 100,000 years to form, an age consistent with how long the site is known to have contained CO2.
The research demonstrates that the natural resistance of the cap rock minerals to the acidic carbonated waters makes burying CO2 underground a far more predictable and secure process than previously estimated.
“With careful evaluation, burying carbon dioxide underground will prove very much safer than emitting CO2 directly to the atmosphere,” says Bickle.
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The Cambridge research into the CO2 reservoirs in Utah was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (CRIUS consortium of Cambridge, Manchester and Leeds universities and the British Geological Survey) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
The project involved an international consortium of researchers led by Cambridge, together with Aarchen University (Germany), Utrecht University (Netherlands), Utah State University (USA), the Julich Centre for Neutron Science, (Garching, Germany), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), the British Geological Survey, and Shell Global Solutions International (Netherlands).
Here’s a thought:
You want to sequester carbon in a nice, stable form, for thousands of years?
Stop recycling paper.
Instead, bury it in old open-pit mines and put a lot of dirt on top of it.
If we buried just half of our paper consumption per year, we’d sequester the equivalent of about 30,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and we wouldn’t have to worry about it leaking out and killing a lot of people.
You’d use a serious amount of energy by doing that.
We’re already doing that. They are called dumps.
Seriously large portion of paper is not recycled, but burnt for energy. Some of it is just discarded, but because waste paper contains a lot of energy, putting it in a landfill is maybe a shortsighted thing to do. OTOH, collecting small amounts of paper around countryside is definitely wasting a lot. Dumping now efficiently recycled paper will not improve energy budgets.
Storing wood and its derivatives is not very efficient, because wood has lots of better uses.
Collecting sea weed or similar that has a small impact on land use and has small energy content per carbon mass might be better. None has come with a good plan yet, though. Maybe genetic engineering is needed to produce photosynthetic energy comparable to fossils in efficiency.
Why sequester carbon?
Estimates show the world produces $10 Trillion in foodstuffs and when components are calculated, the additional CO2 we’ve seen in the past 50 years of so has contributed 15% of that total.
Consequently, the value in food due to additional CO2 is $1.5 Trillion dollars every year.
Why reduce that amount by sequestering carbon? Are all the world’s people fed properly? The answer is NO!
So stop this stupidity; stop sequestering carbon or even thinking about it. To sequester CO2 is stupid and 100% counterproductive.
+100
-50
To be taken seriously one must know that Carbon (C) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) are not the same thing!
Sorry, Slywolfe–with a master’s in geology and another master’s in mining engineering, I’m well aware of the nuances involving carbon in its many forms–as solid, liquid or gaseous; in minerals or organic compound–as well as their various environmental impacts.
This whole charade about sequestering carbon has one goal–to reduce atmospheric CO2 under the false impression that it will somehow prevent catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, which can’t be found regardless of how hard they tease or torture the data. That’s why the CAGW crowd has resorted to models, which conform to their mystical predictions and nefarious schemes.
So please don’t lecture me on the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide; in the current battle with the CAGW idiots they are essentially equivalent components.
CCS is right up there with removing grain stover from the fields and turning it into ethanol. Pretty soon the ground will no longer produce as much crop. The law of unintended consequences.
‘Leaking out’ is not the operative description. Try catastropic release due to a seismic or man made event (see Deepwater Horizon). We have already run the CO2 sequestration experiment. Its called Lake Nyos, Cameroon, 1986. Killed 1700.
For any organization thinking about carbon sequestration, forget the technology. Start first by finding liability insurance against the possibility your endeavor may instantly asphyxiate (i.e., kill) several hundred or a few thousand humans. Once you have committments for this, come back and we can talk about the efficacy of this nonsence. I’m with Patrick Moore here.
Go green! (Photosynthesis that is!)
1700 is nothing compared to the amount of people killed because of the DDT ban. And nobody seems to be responsible for that.
Sounds like Harold found his purple crayon.
The ‘natural accumulation’ of CO2 underground is due to chemical weathering of limestone rocks underground by water made acidic by absorption of NOx and SOx. One by-product of this chemical weathering is limestone caverns.
The SOx, in particular, is scrubbed from the atmosphere where it was mostly injected by volcanoes.
Sedimentary rock is inevitably involved. Caprock in particular is often a sediimentary rock that has been transformed by pressure into an impermeable layer. Not all limestone (carbonate) rocks are overlain by an effective caprock, so in many places this CO2 escapes to the atmosphere, sometimes as carbonated mineral waters (Perrier).
Yes, this seems to be taking isolated geological formations as a proof of concept far beyond what is rational.
This is good news. When they finally realize that CO2 is good, they can just open a valve and let it out. No regrets.
Too bad they can’t just open a valve and voila, there’s the $billions wasted on such a foolish venture.
Just the huge costs of compressing and pumping it under ground.
Well, industrial gas companies have been recovering, purifying, liquefying and storing CO2 for over a hundred years.
They do it so they can sell the stuff. At the end of the line there’s a revenue stream that pays for it all.
With this scheme, it’s all loss.
Yeah, I know. Used to work for Liquid Carbonic (and others) eons ago.
Hey, I don’t think CO2 has any real impact. I could write a computer model that shows that, but why bother?
Well go ahead, I’m pretty sure that’ll get you a Nobel prize if it actually proves it.
Not enough is known about natural variability to prove anything. All we have is writing in the sand.
If the concern is leakage, the CO2 doesn’t have to corrode its way through the cap rock, it only has to rust the completion liner in the injection well and/or wait for the cement shoes or plugs to crumble. Expecting a well to retain integrity against a pressurized corrosive reservoir fluid for 10,000 years without paying for frequent intervention and work-over operations is pretty optimistic
The best place to store carbon is a tree. The tree dies, falls down, and makes carbon rich soil. Over time, you get many feet of carbon rich soil (assuming it doesn’t just wash away after a fire). So, you want to store carbon, plant more trees.
It might even help with the other so-called CO2 induced events like drought, flooding, and rising temperatures.
“The best place to store carbon is a tree.”
…my thoughts exactly…
Except increased anthropocentric CO2 is not impacting the climate at all. So…who cares?
And those trees snarf up all the CO2 that’s available to them, not 10,000 years from now, but right now!
The trees care.
The trees are here to survive and propagate their species, just like humans.
Greenie logic: Planting trees is not green; but placing millions of acres of solar farms on the same land is green.
Cutting down millions of acres of trees in order to place millions of acres of solar farms.
All trees matters 🙂
Actually you can just dump it in the ocean, at 257K, CO2 stays liquid at about 530m deep and it’s density is 1101 kg/m3 (liquid at saturation −37°C) so it should sink, in my back of napkin Calculations and estimates. Maybe an Engineer can chime in with better math and data, I didn’t consider liquid compression, thermal expansion and eye-balled a logarithmic chart.
After 10,000 years, CO2 looses it’s GHG properties????
head slap..
think Mark.
Study Stephen, CO2 has such exceptional absorption in its fundamental bending “Q channel” that it has long since extinguished OLR within a few meters at 280ppm. More gas does not mean more radiation. It just means the altitude of total OLR extinction is lowered, making your surface thermometers sing their siren song.
I could say the same to you. Try it you might like it.
Why is it safe to release the CO2 after 10K years? If it’s bad now, it will be bad in 10K years.
Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder Greenpeace on CO2 https://youtu.be/WDWEjSDYfxc
Sorry but trying to compare a naturally occurring accumulation that happened over a long period of time with injecting CO2 under pressure hardly seems scientifically valid.
Now maybe their study shows that some assumptions about how rock reacts to a corrosive CO2 solution were wrong. But that does not seem to me to immediately translate into long term underground CO2 storage is viable.
What a waste. There goes good plant food, trapped where the biosphere can’t use it. So much terrestrial carbon is permanently, naturally sequestered in benthic carbonate deposits, that this attempt at solving a non-problem is misguided. The recent decades of greening of the Earth due to anthro-emissions is real and hugely beneficial; correcting 10’s millions of years of natural carbon sequestration and carbon starvation that assists in sustaining the current 3 My Pleistocene Ice Age we are in.
And who wants to live in an Ice Age, where humanity gets to become climate refugees huddled below 40deg latitude because most land above 50N/S lat is uninhabitable tundra and ice fields? Talk about resource depletion and wars for territory and resources. Just take awa most of Siberia, Northern Europe, almost all of Canada and US NewEngland and Great Lakes resources and see what happens when 10 Gigapersons compete for the subtropics.
“Here’s a “solution” to a non-problem. We think/hope it’ll work, but hey, you don’t know if you don’t try, right? And who cares if it’ll cost $billions? Think of the industry and jobs. You like jobs, right?”
Of all the eKoStatist schemes , injecting the source of carbon to the biosphere under ground is the most loony tunes .
You cannot drive from Colorado Springs to Denver without passing at least one mile long coal train rolling 24*7 .
The idea of adding 2 atoms of oxygen to each atom of carbon in those trains and then sticking it all in the ground is in itself a definition of insane .
Nature did this 500,000 MYA by turning CO2 into chalk, limestone, marble, coal etc etc. Totally bonkers. I’ve another plan — send me $10m !
Even with subsidies, utility scale carbon capture and storage is not economical unless the capture CO2 can be sold to oil companies for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Does anyone know whether the typical oil field “cap rock” qualifies as “impermeable”?
If it’s not impermeable, the oil would have leaked out millions of years ago.
Sometimes it doesn’t stay put. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/sask-co2-storage-probed-over-alleged-leak-1.1117121
Sorry to say but the sheer quantity of CO2 that would need to be buried every year (gigatons as you generate almost 3x as much CO2 mass as the coal or natural gas weighed) guarantees that it will not be safe nor inexpensive. And since so far our CO2 emissions have been net positive for the environment, a complete waste of money.
No mention of the experimental CCS failure in Illinois. The injected CO2 reacted chemically withnthe briny groundwater to form minerals that plugged up the formation pores. Injection well stoped working after about a year. They drilled another some distance away. Same thing. Shut experiment down.
No reason to think that problem is not universal.
The parasitic load on the Canadian partial CCS pilot (CO2 used for tertiary heavy oil recovery as it reduces oil viscosity) is about 30%. Very poor economics absent tertiary oil recovery value.
Properly designed by reservoir engineers, CO2 injection as a miscible fluid for enhanced oil recovery is very viable. Many fields around the country with few problems. But you have to match a CO2 supply to a reservoir close enough to be economic…might be 20 miles or 500 miles or the pipeline costs make projects uneconomic.
Supply is usually a natural formation containing mostly CO2 or from an oil or gas field with high CO2 contamination in the gas phase. In the latter case, additional costs are incurred to separate the CO2 from the NG and perhaps H2S. Acid gas plants are used for separation…they are not cheap. Overall separation plant cost is usually controlled by the compression needed to transport and inject the CO2. That’s why oil field extraction can be economic, because gas plants run at 800 to 1000 psi which is usually provided by the source reservoir.
Conversely, when the CO2 source is flue gas from a coal or natural gas powered power plant, the compression cost can be exorbitant to raise the pressure from inches of water to 1000 psi. And that still requires the acid gas plant.
I’ve estimated costs to add carbon capture to power plants…one can expect to add 50% to 100% to the plant cost, at least.
Not to mention consuming a significant fraction of the power plants output.
Please provide links on Illinois project. Thanks.
For a fee of course, and a grant, and few hundred demonstration projects, and consultants, and connected insiders, and indifference in the end when all is largely forgotten
Greenie logic: Adding CO2 to the air causes ocean acidification; removing natural gas from the earth causes methane in the ground water; but adding CO2 to the ground does not cause ground water acidification.
What gasses drive the stupendous volcanic ash clouds that are hurtled into the stratosphere during eruptions such as at Mt St Helens, Mt Pinatubo, Eyjafjallajökull etc.? Carbon dioxide is one of many that include methane, water vapor, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, among others.
Water is the primary culprit–just like lifting the lid off a pressure cooker, that hot water flashes and anything in the mix is carried with it. Here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rQhyoxDRCI
I spent a couple of weeks in Wyoming and Montana. Lots of sour gas there. The companies I visited processed the gas to remove the H2S and Co2 and re-injected into the formations for EOR. The wells I was at injected about 60%H2S and 40% Co2 at a couple of thousand psi. Dangerous as all get out. Other than enhancing recovery, doesn’t seem to affect the formations.
Here’s a thought: Think of a coal power plant as a ‘mine’ that produces CO2. Collect it, and sell it to companies that want to buy it.
Sure. As long as it’s the free market paying for it. But that isn’t what they are talking about, is it?
I think you are right. I am proposing something different than they are.
From whence comes the magic 10,000 year number?
I checked other replies, but nothing, so let me be the first to try to answer. The radioactive waste thumb rule is to wait ten half-lives and it’s (mostly) gone. That works (sometimes) for short half lives where you don’t start out with too much. Now residence time for “carbon pollution” in the atmosphere is half-time (not radioactive half-life) x ln 2. One-tenth of 10,000 years is 1,000 years or the official adopted residence time. However, the actual residence time based on carbon-14 tracer studies is on the order of ten years, but that is another can of worms.
Has any study been done to determine if it isn’t simply cheaper to plant 500 acres of trees per megawatt of the local plant?
There is no comparison between the two enterprises. CCS is the equivalent of digging a giant hole, dumping in fertilizer, and filling it back in, while tree farming is a profitable business. My guess is you’d be hard-pressed to find 500 acres available and suitable for that, since it would have already been done.