American chemists express their fascination with coal, CO2 sequestration.

[NNadir]

"This article reviews the storage of captured CO2 in coal seams. Other geologic formations, such as depleted petroleum reservoirs, deep saline aquifers and others have received considerable attention as sites for sequestering CO2. This review focuses on geologic sequestration of CO2 in unmineable coalbeds as the geologic host. Key issues for geologic sequestration include potential storage capacity, the storage integrity of the geologic host, and the chemical and physical processes initiated by the deep underground injection of CO2...

...a discussion of gaps in our knowledge base that will require further research and development. Further development is clearly required to improve the technology and economics while decreasing the
risks and hazards of sequestration technology. These concerns include leakage to the surface, induced seismic activity, and long-term monitoring to verify the storage integrity. However, these
concerns should not overshadow the major advances of an emerging greenhouse gas control technology that are reviewed in this paper."

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/enfuem/asap/abs/ef040047w.html

Like the world has time for this shit...

We have to be the most pathetic first world (though not for long) country in modern times.

[ProgressiveConn]

1. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

We will need to "fix" the environment not just stop it from getting worse right? We need to put all that Carbon back underground...

[NNadir]

2. Because 1) it won't work, and 2) it will take decades we don't have

to install. 3) It still leaves with millions of tons of ash, 4) it will be expensive, 5) there are far better and safer options.

[ProgressiveConn]

3. Why wont it work?

I've always heard of carbon capture technology from those who thought it was a good thing. I don't know why this shouldn't be a part of the environmental effort as long as it doesn't take away from more vital efforts such as cutting carbon introduction to begin with. Is it just because some people might see it as an excuse to continue their assault on the environment?

What are the far better and safer options besides efforts to "Re-Green" the world?

[NNadir]

4. I'll refer to one of my earlier posts as a place to start.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=5609&mesg_id=18332&page=

Please see post #81.

[ProgressiveConn]

5. Well post #81 suggests that you mean

that carbon capture technology is faulty because it would be used as a way to continue the use of fossil fuels specifically coal. I don't see this as necessarily the case. There is no reason we can't go about shifting away from a hydrocarbon based fuel economy while we also pursue carbon capture. I just think we will have to do more than plant lots of trees to fix everything.

I tried to read the paper you linked to in the first post but you have to log in to get more than just the abstract. Not that I'm qualified to actually have a say on it anyhow. =)

Thanks for trying. =)

[NNadir]

6. Planting lots of trees would be a good idea, if it worked.

Unfortunately one of the products of climate change is the destruction, not the creation, of forests. This is because of droughts (which we are now seeing) and the change in the types of parasites that can survive in these forests.

In any case, all forests ultimately come to an equilibrium position at which they are carbon neutral. Only new forests are true carbon sinks. Even if the entire planet were forested (which will not happen), and all the coal were burned, there would still be a greenhouse effect. This is because the coal itself represents the sequestration of many hundreds of millions of years of forests.

I believe forestry has a role in attempting to save the future, as does solar energy. But neither of these strategies are sufficeint for addressing even a small fraction of the crisis.

There is no such thing as safe or clean coal. There is NO solution for coal waste, which unlike the "nuclear waste" many uninformed people carp about, is already killing people and has been killing people for decades. In an time when runaway consequences of atmospheric collapse fall directly on our doorways, or in our kitchens, we will see that the number of people already killed by coal will soon be dwarfed.

[ProgressiveConn]

7. Hey I didn't mention any of that.

I completely agree with everything you said above. My question is why is pursuing carbon capture technology in addition to non fossil fuel energy a bad thing?

Don't we eventually want to get back to where we are today? We don't really know how far this climate change train is going to go but shouldn't we be trying to throw the sucker in reverse? As you pointed out it is impossible to do by reforesting the world so shouldn't we look into this at the very least? Am I wrong in seeing carbon sequestering as the beginning of advanced methods of carbon removal from our atmosphere? Something better and faster than iron seeding the oceans and filling our urban world with trees?

I've heard good things about saline aquifers in the south China see that could lock up INSANE amounts of liquid CO2 permanently. We took this shit out of the ground to begin with. We are gonna have to put it back eventually.

And I'm with you on making an immediate shift to nuclear power. Hell why do we not have MASSIVE power plants out in the western salt flats? I doubt they worry about security at groom lake etc. Why not just build a bunch of massive reactors out in that insane security? I see all kinds of lakes and rivers in Nevada. =) Hopefully projects like ITER will work out cause fission isnt an infinitely sustainable energy source either...

[phantom power]

8. If we could scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, it would probably

be much better to use it for manufacturing new fuel. That would be a truly carbon-neutral cycle. Fuel --> CO2 --> Fuel.

Also, I'm suspicious of how much anybody *really* understands about the consequences of pumping gigantic amounts of CO2 into various underground geologic structures.

[NNadir]

9. This is an excellent point that bears repeating.

We can make carbon cycles industrially, it is well within the realm of technical and economic feasibility.

Still, with or without solutions to energy availability and energy wastes, the basic fact is that the world is vastly over populated. One of the problems with all facile answers to energy/waste problems - including my own - is not that it will work badly, but that it will work too well. This will lead to unsustainable complacency about the loss of habitat, species diversity, continental mineral balance, etc, etc.

Put another way, the biggest risk of nuclear energy is that it works.