By Seth Masia
Solar Today deputy editor
It was a tough week for advocates of federal climate-energy policy, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) withdrew support of the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill.
It was a tougher month for the American fossil fuel industry. Forty-five workers were killed in three major industrial accidents involving a coal mine, an oil refinery and an off-shore drilling rig. The drilling rig explosion, fire and sinking led directly to a major oil spill.
At the same time, the mainstream press picked up an academic paper, published in November in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, in which two Texas-based petroleum engineering professors destroyed the myth that underground carbon sequestration is practical on any economically viable scale. The paper, by Christine Ehlig-Economides, professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael J. Economides, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Houston, says, in part:
Solar Today deputy editor
It was a tough week for advocates of federal climate-energy policy, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) withdrew support of the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill.
It was a tougher month for the American fossil fuel industry. Forty-five workers were killed in three major industrial accidents involving a coal mine, an oil refinery and an off-shore drilling rig. The drilling rig explosion, fire and sinking led directly to a major oil spill.
At the same time, the mainstream press picked up an academic paper, published in November in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, in which two Texas-based petroleum engineering professors destroyed the myth that underground carbon sequestration is practical on any economically viable scale. The paper, by Christine Ehlig-Economides, professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael J. Economides, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Houston, says, in part:
Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.
Emphasis added.
After reading this paper, it's clear that pumping CO2 down wells is equivalent to pumping $1,000 bills into the ground.
Seth Masia
Liz Merry
