14 DAY TRIAL // As experts are considering methods of getting rid of the excess carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing that we use deep saline aquifers to store greenhouse gases for prolonged periods of time.
According to the experts, these rocks have the ability to store at least a century’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions inside, helping us to buy some time in our fight against global warming and climate change. The video below describes the approach in more detail.
This proposal solves a large number of issues associated with similar ideas in the past. However, money is still a problem, since applying this carbon capture and storage (CCS) technique would require serious investments. The team is currently thinking about more cost-effective ways of applying it.
The new investigation was led by the ARCO associate professor in energy studies, at the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ruben Juanes. Graduate students Christopher MacMinn and Michael Szulczewski were also a part of the research group.
Details of this investigation appear in this week's issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The team says that more than 40 percent of CO2 in the air today is accounted for by the emissions of coal-burning power plants.
Juanes believes that global warming and climate change will therefore “not be addressed unless we address carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants.” Storing the greenhouse gas in saline aquifers could be a comparatively cheap method of doing this.
“We should do many different things, but one thing that’s not going away is coal,” he explains, saying that the fossil fuel is a very cheap and widely available power source. Therefore, we need to work towards mitigating the effects it has on the environment.
Saline aquifers are an excellent place to deposit carbon, because they are located more than half a mile below the surface, much deeper underground than freshwater aquifers used for practical applications.
Estimates as to how much GHG such an aquifer could store vary widely, primarily because no one was ever interested in mapping their full extent. In addition, developing computer models of how concentrated, liquefied carbon dioxide would spread through such formations is proving to be extremely difficult.
“The key is capturing the essential physics of the problem, but simplifying it enough so it could be applied to the entire country,” Szulczewski concludes.
