Just not enough space to bury carbon

It turns out carbon sequestration is more than just expensive. A new report has found that we're going to need some 5 to 20 times the amount of space underground once thought to store all the carbon we release from our plants.

The study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, "Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume," notes how published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system.

“Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.”

For a typical commercial coal-fired power plant, this is interpreted as a storage area the size of a small US state!

“Conversely, for more moderate size reservoirs, and with moderate permeability there would be a need for hundreds of wells. Neither of these bodes well for geological CO2 sequestration and the findings of this work clearly suggest that it is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.”

There goes another hope for the coal lobby.