U.S. plans to 'bury' tons of carbon dioxide

SOCORRO, N.M. — New Mexico Tech will coordinate a project to inject million of tons of carbon dioxide into a sandstone formation that stretches from Colorado through Utah and Wyoming, removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

The U.S. Department of Energy this week announced three projects around the nation to sequester carbon, or store it underground.

New Mexico Tech will head the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration, which will inject carbon dioxide into the Entrada sandstone formation. The partnership includes the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma and Kansas and parts of Texas, Arizona and Wyoming.

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a report this spring, said technology such as hydrogen-powered fuel cells, advanced hybrid and electric vehicles with better batteries and carbon sequestration will become more commercially feasible.

The Energy Department said the formations being tested by the regional partnerships are the most promising geologic basins in the nation, and together they have the potential to store more than 100 years of carbon-dioxide emissions from major sources in North America.

The Tech-led project will test the limits of injection and demonstrate the integrity of the cap rock to trap the gas, the DOE said. The information will be used to evaluate locations around the region where future power plants are being considered.

Studies are aimed at proving sequestration as a viable option to get rid of greenhouse gases, Reid Grigg, senior engineer for the Petroleum Recovery Research Center at Tech, said Thursday.

Researchers want to do carbon sequestration "in a way that is scientifically and engineering based and as economically as possible — how it can be done and how it can be done right and economical," Grigg said.

Depending on congressional appropriations, the DOE intends to invest $197 million in the three regional projects over 10 years. The southwest project is to receive $65.4 million from the DOE, with an additional $23.4 million from the partners.

Projects will study not only where carbon dioxide might be sequestered but also how it might be put to use, Grigg said.

"We're looking at CO2 as a product from combustion," he said. "Instead of putting it in the atmosphere, we're storing it away or using it for useful things such as increased gas production, increased oil production or helping the plants grow, instead of damaging the environment."

The partnerships have existed for some time and are in a second phase of work. That will continue, but Phase 3 will start earlier than planned "because the government sees that this appears to be critical, appears to be affecting the climate," Grigg said.

Grigg said researchers are interested in seeing if they can detect any carbon dioxide escaping to the surface "to see that the CO2 is staying where we put it."

They also will look at injecting the gas into saline aquifers 1,000 to 2,000 feet underground. Grigg said the nation eventually will run out of coal, oil and coal bed methane fields, but that large saline aquifers unusable for drinking water could be used to sequester carbon

"We're looking at it from a lot of different angles," he said.