Scientist Scramble to Estimate Sequestering Potential for CO2. By Paul Voosen, Greenwire, April 28, 2010. "When it comes to efforts to store carbon dioxide underground for a millennium or more, Holland has been leading the way, planning for years to turn declining natural gas fields off their shores into storage sites. Initial estimates of the fields were promising. It seemed 40 years of emissions from eight large coal-fired power plants could be stored. Then scientists looked closer, probing each site's geology, to disturbing results... Soon enough, the Dutch had to cut their storage estimate in half... As politicians and businesses push forward with carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as their 'bridge' to renewable energy, geologists are scrambling to properly estimate how much CO2 can be stored in deep, water-flush rock formations -- called saline aquifers -- that have long been ignored by, well, pretty much everyone. They are blank spaces below the map and are only beginning to be better understood… Beyond efficiency, there are a host of other factors that could drop the practical storage reserves. A large issue will be injectivity, whether the massive volume of CO2 produced by coal-fired plants can be injected underground without a burdensome number of wells. Some formations will have poor sealing rocks, unable to resist added pressure. And saltwater displacement could kill other potential projects."
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