The Department of Energy (DOE) announced today it will fund $27.6 million for next generation carbon capture methods using geologic storage. The funding includes monitoring and evaluating CO2 storage, including risk assessment and verification of sequestration. Suspiciously, this announcement follows on the heals of last week’s State Department’s approval of a pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to the United States. The 1,000 mile crude oil pipeline will run from Hardisty, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin.
19 projects will be funded by the DOE. John Litynski, sequestration division director at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, explains:
These projects represent specific areas in monitoring CO2, both in the subsurface and at the surface, that helps to meet our goals to account for 99 percent of CO2 once it’s injected. We’ve actually been doing monitoring for quite a while — ever since the program started 10 years ago, but we’ve been doing some field activities with the regional partnerships and now we want to make an effort to start looking at verification and accounting protocols after the field work. We’ve selected the new projects to fill in the gaps.
The premise behind geologic methods of carbon sequestration is to utilize the porous space in rocks for storage by injecting them with high pressure CO2.
The University of California, Berkeley announced in April, 2009 they would receive DOE funding “to find better ways to separate carbon dioxide from power plant and natural gas well emissions and stick it permanently underground.” Berend Smit, professor of chemical engineering and chemistry, ominously stated:
We never hope that we need to use these next generation carbon capture methods; that solar and other alternatives are there in time, but if the worst possible scenario happens, that we decide to burn all tar sands and all coal that generate an enormous amount of CO2, then we want to have the technology available to put the CO2 into the ground in an efficient, cheap way that may buy us the essential time we need to develop alternative energy technologies.
It looks like the Obama administration is banking on needing these next generation carbon capture methods by going forward with the tar sands pipeline and continuing America’s addiction to oil.
[...] has to change their lifestyle.If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There have been a number of proposals made, and millions spent on pilot projects. But nobody knows if we can do this on a scale that will make [...]