Carbon Ready

Pumping liquid carbon dioxide underground on a massive scale so it won’t contribute to global warming has been talked about for years. ­Howard Herzog, an MIT chemical engineer and the program manager of the Carbon Sequestration Initiative, an industrial consortium, says the most recent international conference on the subject–in Trondheim, Norway, earlier this year–made clear two things: First, the geological questions are being resolved favorably. Second, without policies that put a price on CO₂, it’s unlikely that any sequestration facilities will actually get built.

Herzog: When this international conference series started in 1992, it had 250 people and less than 100 papers. We had 1,000 people in Norway, and 500 papers.

Herzog: There is no indication of any leaks, and they’ve done some seismic tests that show the CO₂ is staying in the underground geological formation. The amount of monitoring hasn’t been such that you can say for certain there are no leaks–but none has been detected.

Herzog: At the Norway meeting, the biggest category of papers was on geological storage. I think the work coming out says they are gaining a higher degree of confidence that this will work–and work well, if implemented with good practices.

Herzog: With a European carbon-trading system, several utilities have announced projects to build plants with CCS [carbon capture and storage], which is indicating at least at the high level that those price signals were enough to induce serious interest.

Outside of Europe, despite the lack of specific policies, there is still a lot of interest in this technology. People feel that over the next 10 years, policies will be put in place throughout most of the developed world.

Herzog: Utilities are not going to build them unless the policy is in place or they are really sure that policy is imminent. It’s easier to announce projects than build them.

Herzog: In the next three years, the chances of anything happening are negligible. But within the next 10 years, I think the chances are greater than 50/50 that we’ll have some kind of carbon policy. I think no matter who is elected in the 2008 election, there will be changes.