According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. and Canada have enough geological storage capacity to sequester about 3500 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) underground. That’s about 900 years worth of CO2 emitted by power plants.

Carbon sequestration is the process by which CO2 is captured from a source (like a power plant) before it’s released into the air and pumped into an underground rock formation. This is called geological sequestration. Another type of carbon sequestration is terrestrial sequestration, where the carbon is stored in long-lived sources like trees or soils, for example.

A new Carbon Sequestration Atlas reports that 4,000 power plants and other stationary CO2 sources are located above sequestration sites. Dawn Deel, a carbon sequestration manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) said that most power plants would have the capacity to store CO2 nearby or directly underneath them. She told Reuters: “The capacity sites are very widespread. They cover the majority of the area in the United States and a good bit of Canada.”

But one of the major hurdles of sequestration – the enormous cost – was not included in the study. The equipment to capture the CO2 at the power plant, transport it, and then bury it underground could add up to 20 percent to our electric bills, according to a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. That’s also what a 2005 United Nations study found.

Carbon sequestration is not commercially available yet in the U.S., but other nations have been moving forward with it. Norway has been pumping CO2 into a natural gas field for a decade, with no leaks detected so far. And in February 2007, the largest experimental carbon sequestration project began in Australia with the drilling of a 6000 foot well. If there are no leaks, researchers will begin injecting CO2 into the well in July.

I’d like to hear from readers on this one (not that you’d hold back!). I’m personally a bit up in the air on carbon sequestration. It’s incredibly expensive, so why not first push forward with efficiency measures and renewable energy? Or, because global warming is such a threat, should the U.S. push forward with this technology at the same time we increase renewable energy and efficiency, despite the cost?

Mongabay.com
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Ecosystems
Reuters, via AlertNet
Technology Review
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency