Earth too warm? Bury the CO2.

[jpak]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0731/p01s05-wogi.html

Snyder, Texas - Under a blazing west Texas sun, with a whiptail lizard and cattle looking on, Rebecca Smyth works with an assistant to lower a measuring line, then a hose, and finally a slender plastic capsule down an old water well 200 feet deep.

She's hoping the water samples she collects will yield clues to what is, arguably, one of mankind's most pressing environmental questions: Can nations bury their greenhouse gases?

If they can, then governments will have bought themselves a decades-long respite as they search for less carbon-intensive energy sources. If they can't, then a significant rise in global temperatures by 2100 looks inevitable, if fossil-fuel consumption continues at its current pace.

And the answer may well lie here, atop an old west Texas oil field known simply as SACROC, where more CO2 has been pumped underground over a longer period of years than anywhere else on Earth. Her efforts – and those of the rest of a small army of scientists funded by the US Department of Energy – are being closely watched. Energy companies want to know their options as Congress mulls over legislative options to global warming. Environmentalists are eager to find ways to slow the rise of greenhouse gases.

<more>

[phantom power]

1. Taking solid (or liquid) carbon out of the ground, reacting it with oxygen...

does two things:

1) it adds mass, in the form of two oxygen atoms for each carbon atom. Quite a lot of mass: 2.7 grams of oxygen for each gram of carbon. (and yeah, you're getting rid of the hydrogen atoms, but come on).

2) it turns the carbon from a solid, or liquid, that is dense and relatively easy to store, into a fucking gas, which strikes me as a lot harder to store. Even if it's "underground."

Bad things are going to happen. A lot of people want this to work. There is going to be enormous pressure to declare this "practical," regardless of how well it really works, or how safe it is, or how much we can really stuff back down into the ground.

Reminds me of biofuels, that way.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Sweep it under the rug ... how long before we run out of rug? nt

[tridim]

3. Or, just plant more trees. nt

[NNadir]

4. What? A permanent respository for dangerous fossil fuel waste?

In a back yard?

How many billion tons will be contained there forever.

What?

You couldn't care less if dangerous fossil fuel waste remains dangerous forever?

Oh.

[jpak]

5. Ummm...dangerous fossil fuel wastes will be stored underground by natural processes

It's called the Carbon Cycle...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/nature02131.html

Crustal weathering, production of soil organic matter and burial of organic and inorganic carbon in marine sediments will eventually remove anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-long-will-global-warming-last/

Dangerous deadly plutonium produced by dangerous deadly nuclear reactors, on the other hand, has a much longer lifespan than dangerous fossil fuel wastes...

[NNadir]

6. Really?

Carbon dioxide is being pumped underground and it's going away?

How exciting!!!!!

And here we were all worrying about it...

Did you write to Al Gore et al explaining the situation?

It's pretty interesting how blithe you are about 28 billion tons per year of dangerous fossil fuel waste. A report from you about a Texas backyard and it all just goes away...

How cute!

Some people actually are a little more concerned...but I guess you couldn't care less about their concerns, could you?

Take these guys for instance who write:

The perfect reservoir and trap rarely exist, with most reservoirs leaking to some degree. The critical question is the rate of gas loss towards the surface and its ultimate fate. In the petroleum exploration industry, surveying for shallow soil gases or submarine pore fluid chemistry anomalies is a common exploration tool. The shallow anomalies can point to a possible reservoir at depth, and furthermore may indicate the nature of the trapped fluid (Schumaker and Abrams, 1998). Evidence of natural CO2 leakage to the surface occurs in eastern Utah (near Crystal Geyser south of the town of Green River, between Farnham Dome and Woodside on Fig. 1).
Travertine has been precipitated, and a nearby abandoned well geysers intermittently (Baer and
Rigby, 1978). .

Extensive bleached zones visible within red sandstone outcrops around the Colorado Plateau
have been commented on for many years. Recent work by Chan et al. (2000) suggests saline
groundwater that has interacted with hydrocarbons, organic acids, or H2S, has reduced the ferric
iron to more soluble ferrous compounds, and at shallower depth these waters have mixed with
oxygenated groundwater causing precipitation of iron and manganese cements. We question
whether groundwater saturated with CO2 could also cause bleaching of red sandstone. The pore
water from CO2 reservoirs rapidly corrodes steel production casing, and in geothermal settings,
shallow CO2-rich waters have been known to corrode both grout and casing within a matter of
years (e.g. Hedenquist and Stewart, 1985). It is interesting that the production zone from
fractured basement granite beneath the Springerville (Arizona) CO2 field is extensively altered
(Rauzi, 1999), whereas non-productive basement is apparently not altered. We are currently
investigating core from this field to see whether the alteration is consistent with interaction with
CO2-rich fluids.
One of the major concerns about subsurface sequestration of CO2 is the potential for the gas to
return to the surface in relatively large volumes, not only negating the original sequestration
intent, but also causing a potential environmental hazard through ponding in low-lying areas. As
part of our present study we hope to ascertain the extent to which CO2 is naturally seeping to the
surface in the vicinity of known CO2 reservoirs. For example, the main reservoir at Farnham
Dome (central Utah) is only at 900 m depth, whereas that at nearby Gordon Creek is at 3300 -
3900 m depth. We suspect the shallower the reservoir, the more chance for surface leakage and
the less chance for sequestering the CO2 as dissolved species in the groundwater or as carbonate.
Numerical modeling using the simulator CHEMTOUGH2 will assist interpretation of the results
(White et al., this volume).

http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/6a2.pdf

For a guy who is absolutely certain that all of the world's insoluble solid plutonium will magically tunnel right into everyone's brain, for a guy who couldn't care less about the evidence for billion years of plutonium chemistry in places like Oklo, you're awfully certain about the fate of the gaseous highly soluble gas remaining dumped er, I mean, uh, sequestered forever.

I mean carbonate complexes with (gasp) uranium are well characterized, and uranium is known to be a constituent of many geological formations in the Western United States like the coals about which you couldn't care less.

What's the half-life of 28 billion tons per year of dangerous fossil fuel waste being buried in backyards around the world?

About the same as in the Sheep Mountain formation?

Since you are an expert in the geochemistry of rocks, having linked to a page without bothering to produce a single quotation or bit of analysis of what is contained in the article, I'm sure you can explain why the Sheep Mountain formation hasn't been magically absorbed by magic rocks by the "carbon cycle."

Longer or less than the half life of the few hundred tons of plutonium on the entire planet, the metric tons that are squirming and shoving to get into your precious bodily fluids?

What? You don't know? You couldn't care less?

I guess we'll add your name to the list of climate change denial folks.

Did you ever hear of something called acidification?

No?

What a surprise!

I am really, really, really, really, really surprised that dangerous fossil fuel wastes buried underground will go away, but I shouldn't be. There is no evidence that you know any chemistry.

As for the carbon cycle, I do realize that you have big, big, big, big hopes for the carbon cycle, just like you have big, big, big, big, big hopes for solar PV electricity, which still has not produced an exajoule of energy at any time in its 50 year history.

But let's face it. You couldn't care less if your hopes correspond with that little troubling thing called reality.

And now for the "problem" of plutonium, which is the <em>only</em> energy matter about which you couldn't care more - even though you cannot produce one (count 'em, 1, une, uno, ein) person who has been injured by the storage of the plutonium in used nuclear fuel?

What is the half life of plutonium that is fissioned?

Don't know?

Couldn't care less?