EPA’s New Rules Pave Way for Geologic Sequestration of CO2
November 22nd, 2010 by Bruce Hill, Ph.D. Senior Scientist / Geologist
It may sound like science fiction, but what if we could “scrub” all the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants and inject it deep into the Earth, permanently locking it up in rocks? Well, this is fact, not fiction, and it’s called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). And it turns out that the petroleum industry has already been successfully injecting carbon dioxide deep into the Earth for decades. In the sequestration part of the story, CO2 is injected into a porous rock, and locked deep in the Earth under an impermeable bedrock seal the same way fossil fuels have been for tens to hundreds of millions of years. In other words, we’re essentially putting the carbon back where it came from.
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