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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Solution found for carbon dioxide emission?

We have heard many crazy ideas to abide Kyoto Protocol, a set of CO2 emission caps for different countries. One way is to find storages for the CO2 we are producing. Say, underground old mines have been proposed, but a big earthquake could release the CO2 in days and cause an environmental disaster. Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and Columbia brought up a very good idea: injecting CO2 into deep-sea sediments (see their PNAS paper "Permanent carbon dioxide storage in deep-sea sediments"): “At the high pressures and low temperatures common in deep-sea sediments, CO2 resides in its liquid phase and can be denser than the overlying pore fluid, causing the injected CO2 to be gravitationally stable.” How much can we store? “The total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the U.S. coastline is enormous, capable of storing thousands of years of current U.S. CO2 emissions.” Besides, the gas will stay there forever unless an asteroids hit us.

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