14 DAY TRIAL // In order to deal with carbon gas emissions, researchers and world leaders decided to embrace the CCS method, which basically involves injecting CO2 in underground geologic reservoirs.
This technique presumably keeps said chemical compound from polluting our atmosphere.
However, geophysicist Mark Zoback explains that the CCS method is by no means as risk-free as we might want it to be.
As far as he and other fellow specialists are concerned, there are two major problems associated with this technology.
First of all, as the earth's geology continues to change, underground carbon gas emissions are likely to find ways of breaking free from their underground “containers” and end up causing air pollution, which is exactly what we are trying to prevent in the first place.
Secondly, there is a significant potential for induced seismicity, especially in the case of major carbon storage projects.
According to Futurity, the CCS method is presently employed by oil and gas drilling companies alone. However, plans to fight back climate change include using this technique on a much larger scale.
The same source reports that this will lead to roughly 3.5 billions metric tons of CO2 being injected into the earth on a yearly basis. What worries some specialists is that an ever increasing pressure in our underground carbon reservoirs will cause them to break and cause the aforementioned two problems.
Apparently, their predictions are based on the fact that in Arkansas, Ohio, and on the border of Colorado and Mexico several earthquakes caused by human activity have already been reported.
To be more precise: some of the industrial companies there disposed of their wastewater by injecting it into the underground, and this eventually lead to small temblors.
Therefore, geologists believe that, whereas the CCS method can indeed be used to tackle small-scale carbon gas emissions, it is indicated that we find other ways to deal with global air pollution.