White House to fund greenhouse gas removal projects
Date: 22-Nov-02
Country: USA
Author: Christopher Doering
The process, called carbon sequestration, has prompted hopes in the farm sector of a new income source - payments for curbing air pollution - and has been raised at international conferences as an way to deal with so-called greenhouse gases.
Sequestration occurs when grassy crops and fast-growing trees remove carbon from the air and store it in soil or use it to grow roots, stems and leaves.
"Our goal is quite straight forward - we want to know what sequestration technology is likely to be most effective in a region," Abraham told the National Coal Council.
"We want to be ready if science tells us that large-scale carbon reductions are necessary in the future."
Abraham said the administration would fund between four and 10 regional sequestration partnerships across the country. The collaborations, among the power industry, local governments and universities, would develop technology to trim carbon dioxide emissions in the area.
The administration currently provides about $50 million each year to develop new technologies to reduce or capture power plant emissions.
Researchers have yet to determine the most effective and least costly method for capturing and storing carbon dioxide.
Toward that end, the Energy Department said a research team headed by American Electric Power and Battelle could begin studying potential sequestration sites in the Ohio River Valley where carbon emissions from power plants could be stored underground rather than being released into the atmosphere.
The United States generates an estimated 5.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the Energy Department.
While the popularity of carbon removal is likely to grow as technology improves, experts believe the near-term focus will be on other methods of trimming pollution, including greater fuel efficiency and more reliance on alternative fuels.
"It all depends how serious we get about reducing carbon emissions and when," said Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering and science at Carnegie Mellon University. "But before you do this, if you want to start taking carbon out of the energy system, this is probably not the first thing you are going to do."
By the year 2050, as much as 250 billion tons of carbon could be captured from the atmosphere and stored in soil, officials with the Energy Department have estimated. An average of 3.5 billion tons could be removed each year, up from about 2 billion tons currently.
John McCormick, spokesman for the Citizens Coal Council, which works to protect communities and the environment from coal pollution, said the country is "stuck" with coal, the dominant fuel for power plants. The United States has the world's largest coal reserves.
Environmentalists decry coal as a dirty fuel that spews tons of pollutants into the air to contribute to global warming. But pollution from coal has dropped about 30 percent over the last 30 years as new technology has been introduced.