Lynne Kiesling
I've been waiting for something like this for years! A company called Blue Source has a potentially commercially viable carbon capture business model that involves the captured CO2 actually being useful:
Blue Source is piping industrial carbon dioxide from a natural-gas processing plant in southeastern Colorado to an undisclosed oil producer that will, in turn, pump it into an aging oil field. The result should be increased crude production and a carbon-dioxide emissions reduction equivalent to taking 70,000 cars off the road.Blue Source's project is innovative not technically--the company employs off-the-shelf technology--but financially: it is among the first whose business plan hinges on the sale of both the captured carbon dioxide and carbon offsets, a financial derivative generated from the emissions reduction.
I hope this works; it's precisely the not-sexy-but-clever type of innovation that I think will be an effective tool for carbon management, particularly in the face of all of the uncertainty we currently have about most aspects of carbon's effects, anthropogenic vs. non-human, and carbon policy.
There's no "hoping" that this will work. It is done all the time. CO2 injection is one of the way to "enhance" production from nearly spent wells.
http://www.sequestration.org/publish/hnp_oct06.pdf
There are CO2 pipelines all over America for just this purpose.
Sequestering CO2 is a proven technology, just not on the scale needed to completely eliminate CO2 emissions in a country like the US.
This website is a wealth of information.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Illinois+CO2+sequester&btnG=Google+Search
So they are financed by selling offsets (just the same way that "renewable energy credits" are sold to pay for wind turbines and for methane reduction projects, etc. The carbon offsets market is exploiting the gullibility of people who want to have their environmental demons (like minivans and air travel) exorcized without changing behavior.
Let me be clear: I mean that I hope they make money doing something that is so common sense.
Thanks for adding it to my list, Lynne. I'm dubious.
Carbon capture and sequestration from natural gas pplants is fairly routine technology. If we and the Chinese and Indians are going to use our coal-fired electric power plants in the future it is going to needed.
The National Energy Technology Laboratory describes some of these approaches at: http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/carbon_seq/FAQs/tech-status.html.