http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030705/sc_nm/environment_carbon_dc_3
Deep
Rocks Might Ease Global Warming in Carbon Plan
Sat Jul 5, 2003, 7:29 AM ET
By Alister Doyle
OSLO (Reuters) - Rocks
deep below the North Sea or the Ohio River
in the United States could become burial grounds for global warming
despite opposition from environmentalists who fear a leaky,
short-sighted fix.
Governments and companies
around the world are studying ways
to pump greenhouse gases -- created by power stations,
oil platforms or steel mills -- into deep, porous rocks
where they might be trapped for millions of years and curb
a rise in temperatures.
The United States signed
a charter last week with the European
Union's executive Commission and 12 countries including Russia,
China, Japan, Canada and Brazil to research the technology in
a "Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum."
But some environmentalists
say the idea is costly and like trying
to sweep one of the planet's greatest problems under the carpet.
"The storage potential
is enormous," said Tore Torp of the
Norwegian oil company Statoil, which has the world's first
commercial store of carbon dioxide (CO2) in sandstone 3,300 feet
under the North Sea.
"We believe the
CO2 will stay there for many thousands of years.
There is no sign of leakage," Torp said of the project he
leads
at the Sleipner gas and condensate field. Tests began at Sleipner
to filter out and bury CO2 in 1996.
CO2 is the main gas
blamed for blanketing the planet and driving up
temperatures, disrupting the climate with more frequent floods,
droughts and storms that could trigger everything from desertification
to higher sea levels.
In a U.S. project,
drills near a coal-fired power plant run by
American Electric Power in West Virginia have reached about
4,000 feet in a search for CO2 storage sites in sandstone
as deep as 10,000 feet below the Ohio River Valley.
"We'll collect
rock samples to learn as much as we can about
the local geology before deciding," said Neeraj Gupta, project
manager at research group Battelle which is working with groups
including BP and Schlumberger.
Under the scheme, CO2
would be filtered from American Electric's
1,300 MW Mountaineer power plant and buried. CO2 might be injected
into nearby oilfields where it could help raise the amount of
oil pumped out.
PROLONG OIL
DEPENDENCE?
Many environmentalists
see CO2 storage as a distraction from
shifting to clean, renewable energy like wind or solar power
and away from dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil.
"Our view is that
this is illegal," said Truls Gulowsen at the
environmental group Greenpeace, referring to Statoil's Sleipner
scheme. "Dumping of industrial waste at sea or beneath the
sea
is banned."
"It's more important
to build windmills in China than to show
that you can bury CO2," he said. "No one can know if
it will
not leak over thousands of years. And who'll check?" CO2
might
corrode concrete plugs meant to seal wells.
Jason Anderson, energy
specialist at the Climate Action Network
in Brussels, which represents 75 non-governmental organizations,
said European environmentalists were generally more skeptical
than U.S. groups about carbon storage.
President Bush (news
- web sites) pulled the United States
out of the Kyoto pact on limiting greenhouse gas emissions,
arguing it was too costly and wrongly excluded developing
countries.
Anderson said CO2 storage
could prolong dependence on fossil fuels.
"And it costs
more fuel to capture CO2," he said. "Rather than use
one unit of coal you use 1.3 units for the same power. Everything
gets worse."
Statoil now pumps about
1 million tons a year of non-toxic CO2,
produced by everything from living organisms to car exhausts,
into rocks below Sleipner. A million tons is the rough equivalent
of emissions by a U.S. city of 50,000 people.
Statoil reckoned the
technology was cheaper than paying a CO2
tax of about $40 a ton on CO2 emissions in the 1990s. Many other
countries are considering similar taxes to force industry
to meet goals under the Kyoto climate pact.
Torp rejected Greenpeace's
suggestion that CO2 injection
was illegal, noting that it was legally sold and exported
-- it is the ingredient that puts fizz in beer or soft drinks.
"If it was industrial
waste it could not be transported across
borders," he said. "There are no such restrictions."
U.S. officials estimate
that up to 250 billion tons of carbon
could be captured from the atmosphere and stored underground
or captured in the soil in the United States. The United States
generates about 5.8 billion tons of CO2 a year.
Another solution is
to inject CO2 into oil wells. It makes oil
flow more freely and loosens it from surrounding rocks, perhaps
raising output by 5-15 percent.
In West Texas, oil
firms have for years piped CO2 into oil wells
to help raise production. Similar schemes have been run in Hungary
and Turkey. Most of the CO2 stays underground.
