WMU researchers study carbon sequestration benefits

By Josh Holderbaum
Western Herald

Some Western Michigan University researchers hope that the proverb “out of sight, out of mind” can apply to carbon dioxide: out of sight, out of the atmosphere.

A team of WMU geosciences professors and graduate students received a $601,158 federal grant to fund their research in carbon sequestration, a process where carbon dioxide that would escape into the atmosphere is pumped into rocks thousands of feet below the surface.

“The benefits of sequestration are usually lost on people,” Dave Barnes, Ph.D., Geosciences professor and sequestration researcher, said. “It’s not something we connect with helping the environment. Public acceptance of this is a huge obstacle. If there is public opposition to this, it’s not going to happen.”

The process would be another option in the fight against climate change, Barnes said.

“The driving force is our awareness that CO2 and other gases are leading to measurable changes in the climate,” Barnes said. “If we’re responsible for changing the atmosphere, it should be our responsibility to fix it. But what do we do about this? First and foremost we need to reduce our energy consumption.”

Because few alternative energy sources have reduced the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels so far, carbon sequestration would help the atmosphere temporarily while researchers master alternative energy, Barnes said.

“How many windmills do you have to put up?” Barnes said. “What if the wind isn’t blowing? Do I just not turn the radio on? If we can’t expect to solve these things by conserving energy, what do you do? That’s where carbon sequestration comes in.”
For carbon to be sequestered, it needs to be captured from stationary targets, such as exhaust towers on factories, usually by a system of pipes attached to the tower.

Trying to capture carbon from moving targets such as automobiles would be almost impossible due to their small size and the sheer number of them, Barnes said.

Once the carbon has been captured, it can be turned into a liquid-like form, the form most efficient for storage, which can be pumped into porous sedimentary rocks found 2,500 to 3,000 feet below the surface.

Due to higher pressure, the carbon would naturally rise slowly back up into the soil, groundwater and atmosphere, so only sites with impermeable igneous rocks above the sedimentary rocks can be used for sequestration.

Because the sedimentary rocks used in carbon sequestration are the same type of rocks that typically hold oil, Michigan could see a big boost from the research, Barnes said.

“Few people realize that Michigan has a very rich background in oil drilling, about the fifteenth or so largest gas-producing state in the country,” Barnes said. “This place is a very feasible place for sequestration. If you can get oil from these rocks, you can put carbon in these rocks.”

Much of the team’s research takes place at WMU’s Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education, off of West Michigan Avenue near the Western Hills Athletic Club, which houses a collection of rock samples taken from thousands of oil drilling sites in Michigan.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of rocks to choose from in Michigan,” Barnes said. “If you look somewhere else, like in Georgia, a place like Atlanta has igneous rocks beneath it. You could never think about carbon sequestration there.”

Barnes also receives lots of questions about the safety of the process.

“It’s not going to blow up,” Barnes said. “If it gets out, it will migrate rather slowly back to the surface, into our groundwater or soil or atmosphere. There are places you probably won’t want to do carbon sequestration, and you’ll find those out while you’re researching.”

WMU’s team makes up part of the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, one of seven partnerships by the Department of Energy that also includes Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.

Between the federal funding and money received from corporate partners, the group will begin building small-scale experiments to model the process.

“Deploying this capture and sequestration process will help us bridge the change from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources,” Barnes said. “It’ll give us some breathing room and make some other decisions about what we can do to help the environment.”

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Nov 29 2009. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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