Perhaps the best hope for slowing climate change – capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions underground – has remained elusive due in part to uncertainty about its economic feasibility.
Perhaps the best hope for slowing climate change – capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions underground – has remained elusive due in part to uncertainty about its economic feasibility.
In an effort to provide clarity on this point, researchers at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have estimated the energy demands involved with a critical stage of the process.
Their findings(link is external), published April 8 in Environmental Science & Technology, suggest that managing and disposing of high salinity brines – a by-product of efficient underground carbon sequestration – will impose significant energy and emissions penalties. Their work quantifies these penalties for different management scenarios and provides a framework for making the approach more energy efficient.
“Designing massive new infrastructure systems for geological carbon storage with an appreciation for how they intersect with other engineering challenges—in this case the difficulty of managing high salinity brines—will be critical to maximizing the carbon benefits and reducing the system costs,” said study senior author Meagan Mauter, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
Read more at Stanford University
