The partnership's plans

The Big Sky Partnership's sequestration work proceeds in phases. The first phase estimated the storage capacity of the partnership's region, which includes Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and parts of Oregon, Washington and the Dakotas.

The second phase is an actual drill site, located west of Walla Walla, Wash., in the town of Wallula, where the partnership will pump 3,000 metric tons of CO₂ into a massive basalt formation that underlies the Columbia River Plateau. Drilling on Phase II began in January.

Researchers working on Phase II hope to learn whether basalt formations like the one near Wallula will make good commercial sequestration sites. Lab tests show that CO₂ turns into solid minerals rapidly in basalts. Researchers want to see if this works underground as well.

The third phase began in November, when the Department of Energy awarded the partnership $67 million to fund an eight-year project that calls for injecting a million tons of CO₂ per year for three years into a sandstone formation 11,000 feet below the surface near Big Piney, Wyo. The other five years of the project will be spent studying the site and the results of the injection. Phase III work will begin sometime in the next year or two.

Scientists on Phase III want to learn how the sandstone formation responds to being injected with a commercial-sized volume of CO₂, which will be piped from a nearby natural gas processing plant. Importantly, they also want to evaluate the process, from transporting to storing, to learn more about how it could be adapted for commercial use.

Economics: Follow the money

Few people in Montana know more about the potential cost of sequestration than John Antle, an agricultural economics professor at MSU and the partnership's lead economist.

"Sequestration is very expensive," he said, "because no one has tried very hard yet to figure out how to do it cheaply."

Putting carbon into the ground is only part of sequestration. That part is doable, Antle said. What's uncertain, he said, is whether companies will put up the money to make it happen.

Right now, without taxes on carbon emissions or government regulations to cap emissions, the only real motivation for businesses to look at sequestration is to create good will or to speculate on sequestration's future.

"Neither of those is enough incentive," said Antle, who also studies the potential for sequestering carbon in forest growth and agricultural soils. "The government will need to pass legislation that makes carbon emissions costly so there's an incentive to reduce them."

While Antle doesn't have a lot of data to plug into his economic models yet, he does think that sequestration is affordable on a national scale. Not cheap, but affordable.

"It's certainly not going to shut down the economy as some people would have you believe," he said. "That's just the naysayers trying to scare people off."

But establishing serious sequestration in the U.S. will be akin to building a new industry such as the railroads or telephone system, Antle said. And while the basic science makes building such systems possible, that's not enough.

"Basic science is great, but we also need science motivated to solve a problem," he said. "And we need to demonstrate that it's economically feasible."

Coal: The reason we need sequestration

Montana holds a quarter of the country's coal reserves and one-sixteenth of the world's supply. That reserve represents enormous revenue for the state, Spangler said. It also represents a lot of potential CO₂ emissions.

The U.S. does want to develop renewable energy, he said. The problem is that until supplies of renewable energy become more consistent and plentiful, fossil fuels--including the estimated 200 years worth of coal Earth holds--will remain the backbone of the country's energy supply.

"If we're going to use all this coal, it would be best to use it in a climate-friendly fashion," he said. That means sequestering the CO₂ generated by burning that coal.

Developing methods to deal with that CO₂ is important, Spangler said, considering recent industrial growth around the world. China, in particular, stands out as a country that needs ways to manage its emissions.

China's construction of coal-burning plants has boomed, so much so that China overtook the U.S. as the world's top CO₂ emitter in 2008. China's coal consumption has doubled since 2000, and if a way to clean up its emissions isn't found, experts say China's CO₂ emissions will outweigh those of all other industrialized countries over the next 25 years.

So finding methods to sequester carbon is not just important to Montana and the U.S., Spangler said. It's vital to buying the time the world needs to develop technologies that don't emit carbon at all.

"It provides the short-term bridge for the long-term solution to be developed," he said.

Return to regular view	Text-only              Email this article	Published: 4/27/2009