WICHITA, Kansas Large industrial operations think electrical power plants, oil refineries, ethanol facilities cough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the ton. That, in turn, warms the planet.
But now some researchers think Kansas could be a good place to pump the gas underground rather than up in the air.
Carbon dioxide is all around us. Plants use it for food. Humans exhale it. Its used in dry ice and to make your soda fizzy.
But its produced in serious, problematic quantities when we burn fossil fuels every time we jump in a car and to generate the majority of the electricity we use.
When we do that, were taking carbon that was once stored in the ground and putting it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, or CO2.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases help trap heat in the atmosphere. Climate scientists predict that if we keep producing them at current rates, annual average global temperatures will rise by nine degrees by the end of this century. Weather patterns will become ever more severe, the oceans will rise.
To prevent some of the catastrophes that would cause, researchers want to stash CO2 emissions back in the ground.
With funding from the U.S. Department of Energys CarbonSAFE program, researchers from the Kansas Geological Survey, environmental policy groups, lawyers and oil and gas companies spent the last three years investigating the feasibility of carbon capture and storage in Kansas.
No matter how you slice it, said Eugene Holubnyak, a petroleum engineer leading the project at the Kansas Geological Survey, were centrally located and I think we have all the necessary components that need to be in place to be a hub for distributing CO2.
The research first looked at the potential of capturing CO2 emissions from Westars Jeffrey Energy Center, a coal-fired power plant located northwest of Topeka. Its one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the country.
The project would work like this.
First, capture the CO2 straight from the exhaust stacks of the power plant. Then, compress the gas into a liquid. It would then be put it in a pipeline and sent to southwestern Kansas where it would be pumped deep into the ground.
In some cases, it would be put into whats known as a saline aquifer essentially a natural underground storage tank.
In other cases, it would be used for something called enhanced oil recovery. That means injecting CO2 into the ground on one side of a deposit to push hard-to-reach oil and gas toward a well on the other side.
The researchers discovered that, at this point, that plan would be too expensive. Even with recently approved tax incentives aimed at jumpstarting carbon capture projects, it would cost Jeffrey Energy Center far more to capture and compress than it could make selling the CO2.
