Quote:
Originally Posted by Michaelangelica
Our government (The Land of Oz) just gave $60M to Chevron Mobil to sequester CO2 gas underground! I read the UK is contemplating a similar scheme
I can't understand how anyone can contemplate this technology.
How do you know if the gas will stay there?
How would you know if it left?
Will it stay for a day, a month a year, a 100 years?
Charcoal in soil has been shown to be stable for thousands of years and make soil more fertile and productive.
(O yes, we get rid of waste, make bio-gas and electricty into the bargain).
What is the problem with governments?
Terra preta is the way to go. It is a 'No-brainer'
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The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has a ginormous report on sequestering CO2 underground ( (www) ipcc.ch/activity/srccs/index.htm). The executive summary and the summaries at the beginning of each chapter do a really good job of concisely presenting the current knowledge related to this technology. These are the same folks who get a lot of media attention when they put out their comprehensive climate change reports.
The general consensus is that this technology is safe and the gas will stay down there for millions of years. The CO2 is monitored through methods such as seismic surveys and long term predictions are done through computer simulations. Both of these techniques have been well developed by oil and gas industries over the past several decades for exploration purposes. Underground storage of natural gas has already been used for over 100 years (even in urban areas), and underground injection of CO2 has already begun in places such as the US, Canada, and Norway.
...so... there's a lot of research indicating that this could work... but... you're still basically putting CO2 down a hole in the ground, and the economics aren't that good yet even with CO2 trading. The US and Canada have used CO2 to pressurize oil fields to increase oil recovery, and the Norwegians sequester CO2 near one of their gas fields because the country has a carbon tax. The gas they extract has too high a CO2 concentration for pipeline transport, and they would get taxed heavily for venting it to the air.
While Terra Preta could be a much more elegant solution, there still isn't that much awareness about it. I often talk to academics studying environmental issues, and nearly everyone has heard about sequestering CO2 underground, but very few have heard about Terra Preta. If they have heard, then they are either skeptical or don't know what to make of it yet. Research interest is definitely picking up though, which should help remedy this situation.
