Worldwide, a staggering 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted into the atmosphere each year, with 25% of the total coming from power generation. The good news is: today’s technology can already capture CO2 emissions from fossil energy plants and inject and permanently lock them deep underground in geological formations. The process is called geological sequestration (GS). But how safe is it?

To answer that, it is helpful first to understand that for three decades, to enhance oil production, each year the U.S. petroleum industry has been successfully injecting 35 million metric tons of CO2 — the equivalent of eight coal fired power plants — into deep rock formations – a total of nearly a half a billion metric tons. The town of Seminole in West Texas sits over one of the country’s oldest and largest EOR facilities, where oil recovery operations are currently injecting one million tons per year, with no harmful subsequent release of CO2. In fact, in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), engineers find that the expensive naturally-mined CO2 they now use for this purpose is hard to recycle back out of the rock for its reuse. EOR is, in fact, carbon sequestration; the “S” in CCS (carbon capture and sequestration from coal and natural gas fired power plants).
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