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).
Does the study look into the fact that the reason these deposits are more than 100,000 years old is only because the conditions were absolutely perfect for maintaining these conditions for 100,000 years? The other areas that had a CO2 bubble underground would have released all of their CO2 through natural actions and refilled with water or other compounds.
They are going to discover that the only place suitable for such a storage facility is, oh, like Yucca Mountain. The cost of building massive pipelines and the energy consumed would dwarf the energy produced by the power plants, which would then only exist for the purpose of pumping CO2 into the ground.
The only purpose of these willfully idiotic proposals is to make using fossil fuels more expensive. If they were serious about solving the non-problem they would spend their money building modern nukes to replace the coal plants.
Yucca mtn would be a poor gas storage facility because it probably has poor permeability and little porosity.
@John MacDonald Then why do gas companies around Lake Erie (and I am sure there are other areas) store NG in old Salt mines?
There is a fundamental difference between storage in salt mines and storage in reservoir rock. Old salt mines would literally provide caverns and tunnels of empty volume. The surrounding salt rock in impermeable. Reservoir rock is solid rock but contains microscopic permeability and porosity. You can’t see it but it can be up to 50% of the structure. But a suitable cap rock is needed.
Yucca mountain is a welded tuff rock in an old caldera and as such probably has lots of porosity and permeability but not a suitable cap rock structure to prevent gas loss. So even gas storage in the 7 miles off tunnels would not work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain
http://www.nei.org/News-Media/News/News-Archives/Top-10-Facts-About-Yucca-Mountain
Most gas fields have cap rock structures and they are millions to hundreds of millions of years old. The analogies are very close.
CCS = Sentencing trees to death.
The totalitarians want to imprison a harmless and vital-to-life gas. I’m contacting Bernie supporters so we can mount a campaign, “Free the C02! Now!”
Sequestering the lifeblood of life?
This would surpass the brilliance of bloodletting. You know the exact wrong thing to do, that man foisted upon himself for thousands of years under the guise of settled science.
Blue whales consume krill
krill consume phytoplankton
phytoplankton consume CO2
Some say we should restrict the blue whales’ food source in the name of “environmentalism”
I think I’ve read somewhere that 20-25% of the power generated from a coal firing plant is required to capture, compress, and pump CO2 into the ground (of course, with dubious results). Guess, who is going to pay for that. One thing that blows my mind is, at the same time, CAGW proponents are telling us we should all stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with electricity (i.e. switching to electric cars). How is making electricity way more expensive going to achieve that goal? The next time I see a hefty price hike on my utilities bill, I’m going off the grid. Going to get myself a bad @ss diesel gen-set. There you go!
markopanama’s Yucca Mountain reference is apt. Decades and billions of dollars later the bureaucrats, politicians, environuts, etc. are no closer to meeting the legal commitment by the U.S. Government to receive waste materials from nuclear power plants.
Thus, the study author’s comment concerning “… regulation, insurance, and who assumes responsibility for maintaining CO2 storage sites.” is a hoot. Maybe this time will be different and the professional obstructionists will fail. CCS will succeed because proponents’ are sincere and their hearts are pure!
Why not just bottle it on a larger scale?
You would need Nero to find use for all of it.
Just pump it into space
Just leave it in the atmosphere….
…. WHERE IT BELONGS !!
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.
Aaaaah, one – the smallest statistical sample in the world.
They certainly pull in the geniuses at the University of Cambridge these days.
Sorry. In Climate Science(tm) the minimum sample size is zero. WUWT carried an article, which I couldn’t find after a brief search, about work by Lewandowsky(?) or one of his cohorts. On close examination, their statistical work had a zero sample size.
But you bring up a fascinating point. For sample size of one, you have zero degrees of freedom. For regression analysis, there would be minus one degrees of freedom. For a Lewandowsky zero-content analysis, the degrees of freedom would be minus one and minus two respectively. My statistical reference tables don’t go that low, but they are printed on paper and dated. Perhaps climate statistics tables are not bounded at the lower end.
(Some \sarc here, but the Statistician to the Stars will have to pry it out of my fingers.)
My mistake, I never considered a zero sample size! 🙂
Did I read that right? This study rejects the output of computer models?
10,000 years? Unfortunately, all the climate software will have to be updated to handle the Y10K problem. Fortunately, I am a Y10K consultant…
Think about what the IPCC has in mind. Underground sequestration of CO2 has a triple advantage : less CO2 means less water vapor in the atmosphere too, subsequently a slight lower density of the atmosphere .
all these effects cause a lower atmospheric temperature. When it becomes too cold CO2 will be vented to the atmosphere and vice versa. The only problem left is the setting of the control valves.
CO 2 Sequestration is stupid, costly, wastes a lot of energy, and for every 12 pounds of carbon one sequesters, they are also sequestering 32 lbs of Oxygen if I remember my Chemistry correctly.
It should be called Oxygen sequestering instead.
Good point.
Here is another idea… Sequester the carbon in structurally- stable compounds from which things can be made, or which can be stored short-or-long term without degradation. How about large-scale reefs, dam substructures, artificial ski mountains, lakebed liners for otherwise caustic locations, raising the elevation of low lying flood plains…
If you really gotta spend money, make something out of it.
Stop starving the trees .
Actually, co2 can be stored for over 87 trillion years longer than needed to avoid a disaster cuz it simply means nothing either way
Actually, the best solution was documented in a film called “Silent Running”. Store the carbon in trees, send them in to space and then blow them up with nuclear weapons.
You sequester carbon by the only method shown viable so far–growing trees. But while California has AB32 to lower carbon dioxide emissions based on carbon exchanges, the governor demanded we let all of our plants die in all urban cites to save water this year. Quick calculations on my typical clippings trash for my lawn before it died, extrapolated to all the major CA cities acreage, estimates we just lost 20% of CO2 sequestration for the state by this policy. So as usual, Democratic Party leaders talk out of both sides of their mouths at once, demanding lower CO2 emission while destroying CO2 sequestration, the flip side of this equation. Lawns everywhere are dead to preserve a Sacramento delta bait fish while agriculture in the Central Valley goes unused to sequester carbon and our lawns and plants all die in Los Angeles and other major urban centers throughout the state. For example, my demand letter to cut back was just a mere 90%. Oh right, they advertised 30% in the press. Well that was for public consumption. Why must I cut back? Because we have less Colorado water and less Owens aqueduct water. Oh gee, we use 75% groundwater here in Lancaster, CA and zero Colorado and Owens water. No mind, must cut back anyway because of drought in Uzbekhistan and we must stand with them, or similar political logic. So this is how a Democratic state works. No carbon ground sequestration system has worked so far. You pump it underground, you have to frack first to fracture the rock. Then if it reacts with host rock, it plugs your wells. All this crap because we cannot grow trees.
There, fixed it. Almost identical to the same nonsensical worries about vitrified nuclear waste buried 10,000 feet under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Except there’s no risk with that technology, and no cost relative to what CCS is going to incur.
Naturally, I don’t believe in the fear that the “green” CO2-hypochondriacs have that increased levels CO2 is going to destroy the climate thru global warming. But, lets for a moment assume that more CO2 in the atmosphere is bad. It is estimated that the amount of dissolved CO2 in the form of carbonic acid in the oceans is at least 50 times that of what exist in the atmosphere. Isn’t the cheapest and easiest way to dispose CO2 to pump CO2 deep into the oceans at the depth of 1000 or 2000. Not much of that is going to reach the atmosphere for a very long time.
“The CO2 must remain buried for at least 10,000 years to avoid the impacts on climate.”
That threw me. What’s magical about 10,000 years? Is that how long it takes for bad CO2 to evolve into good CO2 that won’t impact the climate? Or are they assuming there will be no humans, or that we will have moved away from fossil fuels by then? Or is that how long they think it will take for the world to come to its senses and realize that CO2 isn’t a significant threat to the climate?
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate so all of this does not really matter. There is reason to believe that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is 0.0. The safest way to store the Carbon would be as diamonds. Diamonds can be stored above ground in fire proof buildings. Turning all the CO2 on our atmosphere into diamonds and left over O2 will have one little adverse effect. It would cause life, as we know it, to end on this planet.
Diamond has a density of 3.5 tonnes per cubic meter. So, if you wanted to store 3.5 gigatonnes of carbon, the diamond would have a volume of 1E9 cubic meters. That’s a cube with dimensions of 1000 x 1000 x 1000 meters. For comparison, the great pyramid of Giza when built had a height of 146 meters.
You would need about 385 pyramids to match the volume of the 1000 meter cube
Other carbon materials are less dense, graphite is 2.25 tonnes per cubic meter, or cellulose at 1.5 tonnes per cubic meter. Dense woods are only as dense as water, at 1 tonne per cubic meter.
For wood you’d have to worry about long term storage due to termites.
How about a twinkie?? That might last 10000 years. But wheat is less dense than wood. Even if you could make a twinkie as carbon dense as wood, you would need 1E9 cubic meters to store only 1 gigatonne of carbon. So, our one gigatonne twinkie on the scale of the pyramids would be, for example, 150 meters high, 150 meters wide and be 44400 meters long.
That’s a twinkie over 27 miles long, that’s a big twinkie.
There is something seriously wrong with the summary of this study. 100,000 years ago we were in an ice age, and that is still very very recent geologically speaking. No CO2 traps of any size and significance were formed a mere 100,000 years ago. No gas or oil traps either. Many traps, filled with Oil, CO2, Methane, Nitrogen and even Helium have been formed in the past, over many many millions of years, and are still effective traps today. I have not read the original article/study, but nobody would be so ignorant to push a 100,000 year old trap that probably does not exist, when many million year old traps are readily available to study.
I suspect somebody missed a few zeros, or completely misrepresented the study.
The real problem on this Carbon Starved Planet is that there has already been far too much natural sequestration, to the detriment of the biosphere. Even if you happen to believe the human interglacial we live somewhere near the apex of is such a perfect Garden of Eden that it should be cryogenically preserved, there is no evidence sequestering CO2 will have any effect.
There is definitely a risk that we may be cryogenically preserved in the wrong kind of way. Something is cooling the stratosphere twice as fast as even the most adjusted data would have the surface warm.
gymnosperm, I think you are onto something. Maybe you have answered Fermi’s Paradox. We don’t see any aliens because carbon dioxide levels on all life-bearing planets eventually fall to levels too low to sustain life.
This would shorten the time available for intelligence to develop. Sol will brighten over time and drive the Goldilocks Zone beyond Earth’s orbital radius. The depletion of carbon dioxide to levels too low to support life should occur well before that time. So, intelligence has less time to develop and build a technical civilization with the ability to replenish the carbon dioxide and keep their planet alive. They would also have to be of a type TO develop a technical civilization AND of a type to keep it. As of now, I’m not sure we meet that second requiremtent.
So, intelligence has less time to develop. It must achieve high-tech civilization. It must develop an ability to deal with carbon dioxide depletion of the biosphere or die with the rest of their planet. Time becomes shorter. Other civilizations less likely.
I have often seen the opinion that any alien civilizations collapsed by failing to meet their Energy Crisis. Perhaps they did meet them and doomed themselves in the process.
Just thinking. I’m not claiming any truth. Just a bit of thought.
One last thing:
Just think of the irony. In the rush to “save Gaia” the CAGW alarmists may well wind up killing the thing they are trying to save. Talk about unintended consequences! Not that many of that crowd have much ability to think past immediate consequences.
“… carbon dioxide levels on all life-bearing planets eventually fall to levels too low to sustain life.”
Three sister planets:
Venus –> 95% atmospheric CO2
Earth –> 0.04% atmospheric CO2
Mars –> 95% atmospheric CO2
Which one currently supports Carbon based life forms that consume CO2 when considered as a whole? How much longer?
Fun to think about. The chemical properties of Carbon make it ideal for life and also prone to sequestration. Our Pleistocene cold ocean is thought to be sequestering 37k gigatons, over twice the amount in sediments and on land and about 37 times the current total in the atmosphere.
Here in British Columbia farm and ranch land is being bought up to plant trees for carbon credits. We therefore have to import more and more food. Now the funny part there is a huge logging industry here cutting down trees. It is like watching a logging truck from north of town taking logs to a sawmill south of town passing a truck from south of town taking logs to a mill north of town. Happens all the time.
Ah yes, the law of unintended consequences. Add that to all the other stupidities of CCS, and all other Greenie schemes.
Didnt naturally occuring co2 storage Lead to the deaths of a thousand people in cameroon ?