Capturing and Sequestering Carbon Dioxide
I am a simple guy and love to think about simple solutions - no matter how practical they may be. That is the nature of the simple guy. So, when I first heard of CO2 Sequestering, it sounded like a simple and obvious concept. Well, things are never simple and obvious, so I figured I would look into it a little.
First, let’s talk about magnitude - the US emitts a lot of carbon dioxide. How much seems to be debatable. I find numbers as low as 1.73 billion tons in 2002 for all of North America to a little under 7.2 billion tons in 2004 (PDF warning!). Based on some per capita estimates, we get a range of 6 billion tons in 2002 up to a high of over 7 billion tons in 2006. That is a couple of data points, so let’s go with the magnitude of “over 7 billion tons” for our back of the envelope calculations.
What is carbon sequestering? The process describes any number of technologies for capturing and storing CO2 so that it is not emitted into the atmosphere. Storage can be in places like salt mines, depleted oil/gas reservoirs and other geological formations. Well, we have a general idea of what carbon is out there that would be great to capture, but sequestering seems to be a very small part of the solution (but part of the solution!!):
Well, that is 12 million tons vs. 7 billion tons - only about .2% of annual emissions. Granted, that was in 2003 - what else is out there?
I am a little sceptical, but Epira is talking about technology for removing CO2 from the air. Not only are they talking about removing CO2 from the air, but also creating high-carbon fertilizer. Sounds good, so look into it if that interests you. However, I don’t see any good numbers that I can use to figure the scalability of this process. Anyone else that can find those - let me know.
The numbers look a little overwhelming right now, but it looks like I need to do some more reading on sequestering CO2.
