I always wonder about the science behind carbon sequestration.

Pumping gasious CO2 into a finite size container (cavern, well, etc) seems self-limiting. The more CO2 you pump in, the higher the pressure, the more energy it takes to pump additional CO2.

And then, what do you do if your cavern starts leaking?

Carbon dioxide=Plant growth=Good. (Hence why plants GROW in a greenhouse!)Carbon monoxide=Pollution=BAD. Regulating CO2 does NOTHING to stop pollution, and yet we reward compainies for doing precisley that. No wonder companies like Shell and BP are behind this carbon scam! Why haven’t you gotten it through your dense head yet? Just think of all that money you wasted on your (mis)education. Priceless!

The problem with carbon sequestration is that we do not even know if it can be done on a large scale, and how massive an infrastructure it will require.

Injecting millions of tons of CO2 into rock pore-space is difficult enough, but then you have to worry about whether it is going to STAY there, and also what it is displacing. Most pore-space is filled with brackish water, and if we force that out into the streams we could have a serious water-quality issue. Another complication is that they can’t even decide who OWNS the pore-space under private lands.

I think carbon sequestration will probably be necessary to some degree and we should definitely be researching it, but it may not be the silver bullet that allows us to get back to business-as-usual with fossil-fuel burning.

CO2 does it ever just go away? Not that I know of. So it is like nuclear storage last forever.

Look can’t we figure out some way to use the stuff. Turn it into to something usefull.

Just bury it and let someone else worry about it doesn’t sound so good to me.

Thinking

Some companies have been working on trying to recycle their CO2 by “feeding” it to algae, which can then make biofuels out of it. It sounds good in theory, but I’m not sure how efficient it is, and I doubt it could keep up with the massive quantities we are talking about.

But American ingenuity is focusing in on these problems so I expect more ideas soon.

jock59801,

I admit that I am not up to snuff on this, but converting to biofuels to burn, doesn’t that just put the that same CO2 into the atmosphere?

Thinking

Yes, it probably would end up in the atmosphere eventually, since carbon sequestration wouldn’t work very well for transportation fuels. The only benefit is that we get some more use out of it in the meantime, because the algae uses the sun’s energy to convert it back into fuel.

But you are right, it would only be a partial solution. It is still best to leave the carbon in the ground in the first place.

94% of the earth’s greenhouse gas is water vapor, yet we allow a family of 4 generate 2 to 4 gallons a day by existing on earth!! CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas” in the way you dopes think it is and the ice core science that ties it to humans is absurd. This is a waste of time and money by sheep who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Astonishing.