How much CO2 from coal plants will need to be buried in order to make a difference?
According to the popular “wedge theory” of Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, capturing and burying one billion tons of carbon from coal plants by 2050 would contribute one-seventh of the reduction they estimate we need to achieve to stabilize the Earth’s climate. What would it mean to capture and bury a billion tons of carbon from coal plants? Lynn Orr, a petroleum engineer who directs the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University, estimates that to store a billion tons of carbon underground, the total inflow of CO2 would have to be roughly equal to the total outflow of oil and gas today. Needless to say, this would be an enormous engineering project. Is burying CO2 safe? Some environmentalists have unfairly compared underground CO2 storage to the burial of nuclear waste. CO2 is not radioactive, nor is it toxic by any conventional definition. But burying CO2 is not risk-free. The liquefied carbon gas is buoyant underground and can migrate through cr
Related Questions
- Won’t it be extremely costly and difficult to build long CO2 pipelines from the coal power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio to the wind farms in Texas, the Dakotas, and other high-wind states?
- Is the initiative of separating and storing CO2 from coal power really a sound solution? Isn’t it just "green wash"?
- Would Banning Coal Plants & Increasing Natural Gas Use Be A Good Solution To Cutting CO2 Emissions?
