Expert wants to bury CO2
2008-02-19 08:02
Washington - Got a bag of carbon? Send it to Davy Jones' locker!
That's what scientists are discussing on Monday in Boston, on the final day of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference.
David Keith, a Canadian expert on carbon capture and sequestration, planned to outline the idea of storing carbon emissions at the bottom of the sea - in giant plastic tubes several kilometres in length and with a diameter of two football fields.
Keith, director of the energy systems group at the University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy in Canada, admits the idea "looks nutty" at first glance.
"But as one looks closer, it seems that it might (be) technically feasible with current technology," Keith said in a press release before his presentation.
Keith has been studying the feasibility of the idea, originally proposed several years ago by Michael Pilson, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island in the US. Keith has calculated that the bags could be made of current plastics for less than four cents per ton of carbon.
Each bag would hold 160 million tons of liquid carbon dioxide filtered from power stations and other industrial sources and compressed to liquid form. That would be about 2.2 days of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions that are blamed for global warming. The liquid could be transported via pipelines.
The best place to store the bags would be on the "vast flat plains" of the deep oceans - the so-called abyssal plains - which have "little life", Keith said.
"If you stay away from the steep slopes from the continental shelves, they are a very quiet environment," Keith said.
The bags would stay sunk - like a body in Davy Jones's locker - because of the intense pressure of the deep water and the cold temperatures, Keith has calculated.
The real expense would be in the capture and transport of the CO2, Keith says.
"If we can drive those down, then ocean storage might be an important option for reducing CO2 emissions," he said. - Sapa-dpa
- SAPA