There are many strategies at play for reducing the carbon emissions that are driving global climate change. These include reducing energy demand through conservation and efficiency measures and changing over to renewable energy sources. But despite these efforts, the burning of fossil fuels continues to dominate the world’s energy sources because fossil fuels are plentiful and cheaper than the alternatives.
The have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too solution to the problem is carbon capture and storage, or CCS. If we can capture the carbon emissions from fossil fuels and prevent them from entering the atmosphere, we can exploit these resources without altering the climate.
Researchers are exploring many approaches to this problem with varying degrees of success. A publication from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, looks at the prospects for storing carbon dioxide within deep-sea basalts under the oceans of the world.
The authors have identified a number of locations where pressures are high enough and temperatures low enough that carbon dioxide is denser than sea water and would be trapped by gravity. In addition, thick sediments above the basalts would further prevent any CO2 leakage. Suitable locations in the Indian Ocean, northwest Pacific, southeast Atlantic, Bermuda and Aleutians have sufficient sequestration capacity to store several centuries of the current level of man-made CO2 emissions.
Like all known CCS schemes, this one has lots of questions to be answered, but at least in theory, it represents a potential way that the carbon dioxide emissions that are causing us so much grief might be safely tucked away.
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Geological storage of CO2 within the oceanic crust by gravitational trapping
Photo, posted June 19, 2012, courtesy of Ralph Daily via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.