Power Generation

Dangers of carbon sequestration are real, says researcher

An international expert in geophysics and climate science, Gary Shaffer, has said the dangers of carbon sequestration are real and should not be underestimated.

Writing in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, the researcher from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and the University of Concepcion, Chile analysed the effectiveness and low-term consequences of carbon sequestration.

While large-scale use of carbon sequestration could mitigate the extremes of climate change, it is not clear how effective the different means of carbon sequestration are in the long term, nor how much stored CO₂ can leak back out into the atmosphere.

Leakage from deep ocean storage could be a particular problem for sea life and could allow CO₂ to return to the atmosphere relatively quickly.

Shaffer suggests that geological storage could be more effective in delaying global warming, but only if CO₂ leakage is less than 1% per 1000 years.

“CO₂ sequestration has many potential advantages over other forms of climate geoengineering. It makes good sense to modify the Earth's radiation balance by putting carbon back in where it came from,” says Shaffer.

But he cautions that potential short and long-term problems with leakage from underground reservoirs should not be underestimated.

“The dangers of carbon sequestration are real and the development of this technique should not be used as an argument for continued high fossil fuel emissions,” he concludes.

The need for large-scale carbon sequestration should be reduced as much as possible by limiting emissions in the first place to avoid “unwanted consequences and burdens over many future generations”.

For further information:
Gary Shaffer. Long-term effectiveness and consequences of carbon dioxide sequestration. Nature Geoscience (2010), doi:10.1038/ngeo896

28 June 2010

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