Carbon sequestration: Putting the genie back in the bottle

Oil is heading to $150 or $200 a barrel? Time to take deep breath. Breathe out that carbon dioxide. And now I’ve that changed the subject, let’s talk about that greenhouse gas we emit.

Man-made devices have been spewing out greenhouse gases with abandon for more than a century. These gases, including carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons, are recognized as being instrumental in the accelerated warming of the planet during that same time period. Gasoline-burning internal combustion engines and coal-burning power plants are prime contributors. According to the US Department of Energy, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have risen from insignificant two centuries ago to 33 billion tons today.

Is it too late to the put the CO₂ genie back in the bottle (or buried deep in rich vegetation or in the oceans or underground) before Al Gore’s pitiful polar bear (in an An Inconvenient Truth ) has even further to swim to get from that ever diminishing ice floe to solid land?

Norway and its primary oil company StatoilHydro doesn’t think so. Norway became the first country to impose a federal tax on atmospheric CO₂ emissions from combustion-based point sources, when it passed a law in 1991.

The country was ahead of the game. In 1995, The Kyoto Protocol, ratified by 175 countries and territories (though not the US), called for reducing greenhouse gases 5% between 1998 and 2012. One such option for this is carbon sequestration, using carbon dioxide reservoirs or sinks. Natural sinks are found in the oceans (where CO₂ can be pumped to form “lakes” trapped on the sea bottom below the denser seawater) or in areas of grasslands and forests where carbon is removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

Carbon sequestration has yet to be adopted by most countries as part of their energy and pollution strategies for safe disposal of CO₂ waste streams, but Norway is forging ahead.

In 1996, StatoilHydro engineers created a system for separating the 2,800 tons of CO₂ created daily by gas production at its Sleipner West field and injecting it directly into the underground strata of the Utsira sandstone formation, rather than releasing the gas into the air.

In 2007, The Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies began injecting CO₂ into 7,000 foot well in the Otway Basin in Australia with an eye to entombing significant amounts of the greenhouse gas. The next year, Australia opened the first underground geo-sequestration plant in the Southern Hemisphere, designed to capture the CO₂ from a power plant near Warrnabool, near Melbourne. The method in this case involves compressing the carbon gas into a liquid that is then pumped underground.

Other experiments are taking place. The European Union has the CO₂ SINK Project in Germany and similar storage projects are operating in Algeria and Canada. In the US, the Energy Department plans large volume carbon capture and sequestration tests in 2008.

Is carbon sequestration the answer to global warming? No, not by itself. But on a massive scale it might make a real difference. However, without the force of law, Big Oil in the US is unlikely to invest seriously in sequestration technology, let alone make it a major part of future business plans.

That polar bear will need to keep swimming.