Underground carbon storage is the future in Canada. But could it cause earthquakes?
Underground carbon storage is the future in Canada. But could it cause earthquakes?
26 comments
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kao and his team will be monitoring earthquake activity from underground carbon storage facilities over five years, studying the possible effects of the injections and analyzing what can be done to mitigate or eliminate those risks.
"This is an important issue because if the induced earthquakes happen to be a significant one that actually becomes large enough for the local communities to feel it or even have some damage … then the regulatory agencies will have to shut the injection operation down."
Earthquakes caused by injecting a liquid underground — also known as induced seismicity — have been well documented in the U.S. and Canada when it comes to fracking and wastewater disposal, including by Kao in B.C.
If a major earthquake ruptures through cap rock atop of a carbon storage area, it could create a pathway for injected CO2 to escape, he said.
Erik Nickel is the chief operating officer of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre, which oversees the Aquistore carbon storage facility in Estevan, Sask.
"It would make a lot of sense to include us in there because of our history of not really having much seismic activity," Nickel said, adding the site sits on flatlands and is not near the boundary of tectonic plates.
The original article contains 780 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Stop making mimes nervious.
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26 comments
Carbon capture is absolutely not the future in Canada, much as our elected officials may wish it so. It is a waste of time and money, subsidized reputation laundering for a powerful industry.
I've never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.
Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.
Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:
But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.
The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.
Theoretically carbon capture can work, but just like you said, it takes additional energy to capture carbon, and that amount is more than what it takes to produce the needed electricity if you're using a carbon based energy source.
That said, if you go for something like nuclear, than you do get a clean source of energy that can be used to capture existing carbon. But we're already at the point where our energy infrastructure is inadequate for just electrifying what we currently have, and in a few years the Pickering plant is going to have to shut down due to being so old (though apparently the government is trying to delay it as there's no plans for building a new plant of any sort to replace the Pickering plant).
So even in the best case scenario, it'll be more than a decade before any sort of large scale carbon capture scheme can even be started, as that's how long it'll take to build enough new plants to cover existing demand, let alone accounting for future demand.
You need to see it as removing the carbon generated by industries that can't be powered by clean energy, not removing carbon generated by polluting electric facilities.
Ship transportation will probably never be converted to battery power, so running wind farms just to remove the equivalent quantity of carbon released by ships from the atmosphere is a net positive.
Depends on how you do the capture. If you need to engineer the system and feed it energy in a form that we can instead use to power other stuff, then yeah, it doesn't make sense. But if you for example, plant a tree, then that tree would use energy from the sun that you wouldn't otherwise be able to use as easily.
It's a delaying tactic to try and slow the coming effects while we get a better idea.