Store carbon, save the Earth

Slash emissions to stop global warming, warn environmentalists.

Less than a decade ago, the idea of capturing and storing the carbon gases blamed for driving the Earth towards climate-change peril was usually dismissed with a laugh.

HT Image

But a top scientific forum here shows how far the argument for carbon sequestration has come, with a series of experts insisting it can be transformed from fiction to fact.

Driving their case is the fear that time is running out for dealing cheaply with the carbon pollution spewed out by fossil fuels. These emissions trap the Sun's heat and disrupt Earth's fragile climate system, with potentially catastrophic effects a few decades from now.

Their focus is on power stations which burn oil, gas and coal, and whose pollution is set to soar in coming years as China and India, the two world's most populous countries, meet surging needs for energy.

Sequestrators say carbon dioxide (CO₂) would be captured using solvents, either before or after the fossil fuel is burned in the plant.

The CO₂ would then be pumped out, sometimes over hundreds of kilometres, to disused oil and gas fields up to one kilometre (3,250 feet) underground, and stored.

It would not be the miracle cure to global warming or switch off the dependence on fossil fuels that are the source of the problem, they admit.

Even so, "it can play a global role, making very large and very rapid reductions of CO₂ emissions", Jon Gibbins of Imperial College London said on Thursday.

He pointed to a pilot scheme in the North Sea as proof of its feasibility.

An experiment in Norway's offshore field, Sleipner, has been storing a million tonnes of waste CO₂ per year since 1996, pumping it 1,000 metres (3,250 feet) below a cap of shale and mudstone.

Another project is in North America, where CO₂ is being extracted from a coalgas plant in Wyoming and pumped 300km to Weyburn, in Canada's Saskatchewan province, where it is stored in an empty underground chamber in a working oilfield.

Environmentalists say the answer to global warming is to slash emissions themselves and swiftly wean the world off dirty fossils and onto renewable sources and hydrogen.