Carbon Sequestration
By: Jasmine Chauhan
What Is Carbon Sequestration?
- Also known as carbon capture and storage (CCS)
- Capturing carbon dioxide emissions
- Storing it someplace safe away from the atmosphere
What is Carbon Sequestration?
Why Is Carbon Sequestration Important?
- Earth's health is deteriorating as a result of human activities (predominantly combustion of fossil fuels for the purpose of energy generation) that increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
- Traps heat > Global Warming > Climate Change
- Global warming brings drastic changes: rising sea levels, increase in severe weather/natural disasters, Arctic ice melt, and disturbances to agriculture and ecosystems
- CCS can prevent the effects from worsening
- Has potential to decrease emissions from industries and power plants by 90%
Flaws with Current Methods
- Expensive, not feasible
- Not a long-term solution due to unreliability and risks of leaks
- Extended transportation to storage sites
- Overall lack of efficiency
Goals, Research & Development, Obstacles, Benefits
Obstacles
- Lack of investment/funding
- Inadequate regulations (more regulations necessary in order to put carbon sequestration into full effect)
- Lack of emission limiting policies
- Not many policies put a price on carbon
- Few appealing and persuasive investment incentives
Challenge Goals
- Get investments for R&D
- Develop a long term method that is economical, efficient, and safe.
- Clarify/add more regulations in order to make investors more confident towards the cause
- Deploy CCS machinery and put methods into action
- Have 38 energy and 82 industrial CCS projects in effect by 2020 in order to limit temperature rises by 2050.
- Create more policies that limit emissions and put a price on carbon to make CCS a more appealing option to companies and political leaders.
Current Research (Worldwide)
- Carbon sequestration dynamics (the way atmospheric CO₂/the carbon cycle cooperates with the carbon sequestration efforts made by humans) are being studied because they cause dramatic changes to each other
- This helps to predict what carbon conditions in the atmosphere will be like in the future
- Research is being done to assess the storage capacity and permeability of geological structures to assure it's reliability and efficiency
- Enhanced oil recovery is being explored as an option to store CO₂ at oil and gas reservoirs
- Tests are being conducted on coal beds to better understand how they can be used to store CO₂ since injecting it can remove the methane and be absorbed twice as well into the bed
- The safety and environmental effects of storing CO₂ in saline formations are being researched as it does appear as a favorable option
- ^ can store over 12,000 billion tonnes of CO₂
Current R&D (North Carolina)
- Living shorelines like Pivers Island, NC that were made out of salt marsh plants to control erosion on the coast have also been discovered to have carbon storing capabilities
- ^ Known as blue carbon, carbon sequestered by the coastal and aquatic ecosystems
- Concrete industry carbon emissions make up 5% of the global total
- Two concrete manufacturing companies in North Carolina have adapted CarbonCure technology
- CarbonCure tech captures carbon from smokestacks and mixes them into the concrete where it solidifies into a calcium carbonate mineral
- In 2014 alone, this technology kept 20% of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere
Benefits
- We can continue to use our normal energy sources (fossil fuels) without inducing as much harm
- Projected to limit the temperature raise by 3.6° F by 2050
- Minimize the effects of global warming
What happens if we do nothing?
CLICK ABOVE TO FIND OUT!