Friday, July 25th, 2008

Deep-Sea Carbon Sequestration

What if you could take CO2, pump it down a deep hole in the sea floor and turn it into something harmless? New research suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. David Goldberg, Taro Takahashi and Angela Slagle of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. (Credits: Cover image courtesy of Shiny Things/flickr. Filmed and produced by Flora Lichtman.) See More Videos

Could porous rocks deep in the ocean floor be a place to stash unwanted carbon dioxide? While researchers are trying to develop ways to scrub unwanted carbon dioxide from industrial and power plant emissions, the problem of what to do with the captured CO2 is a tricky one. Some have proposed injecting the gas deep into oil wells, while others suggest chemical ways to convert the gas into a solid form that could be buried. Now, scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory suggest that undersea basalt formations some 8,000 feet under the ocean off the shore of the Pacific Northwest could absorb up to 120 years worth of US CO2 emissions. Their work was reported last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this segment, we'll talk with one of the researchers behind the proposal about how it might work.