By Cody McDevitt

February 25, 2019 - Researchers at Penn State University are developing a process by which carbon dioxide emissions from coal and natural gas plants would be injected underground.

The innovation could potentially decrease the amount of air pollution that leads to global warming. 

An illustration of a carbon sequestration project being developed by researchers at Penn State University. They’re creating a real-time geophysical monitoring system to map the carbon dioxide plume movement in the storage place. They have sensors in the surface and borehole. If carbon dioxide leakage is the environmental concern, they’ll be able to provide the warnings before it migrates upward even to the atmosphere.

Submitted photo

“I think so because there is very big storage room for the CO2. Especially in the next half century. We’re going to use fossil fuels for a long time. So we need a more practical solution to reduce the CO2 emissions,” said Dr. Tieyuan Zhu, one of the leading scientists of the work.

“You talk about solar or wind or clean energy, that’s great. But in the next few decades, they’re not going to dominate the market. Oil and gas will. That’s the stuff people use. So the carbon sequestration...there’s a lot of successful storage.”

The news could be welcomed in Somerset County, which according to the Appalachian Region Commission, stands alone in Pennsylvania as the most detrimentally impacted county in the northern Appalachian region as the anti-coal policies continue. Leading politicians and scientists had called for an end of coal use altogether because of its carbon dioxide emissions that ostensibly leads to global warming.

The prevailing thought among the scientific community is that carbon dioxide is efficient at trapping thermal energy from the sun. The sun sends light into the earth’s atmospheres and hits the surface.

When there is more carbon dioxide it prevents the thermal energy from escaping back outside the atmosphere. It reflects back to the surface, according to Eugene Morgan, another scientist involved in the study.

The basic principle of carbon sequestration is to ship the carbon, compress it and inject it into the subsurface to a 1 kilometer depth. But are there any environmental risks from injecting carbon dioxide into the ground? That’s the question that a lot of scientists wonder.

“There are a lot of risks. This is a really important subject to study,” Morgan said. “Let’s say you injected a good amount into the subsurface, and it’s expanding out to the geologic formation, there are a number of risks there that could move the CO2 to where you don’t want it to be. There are a natural faults that can make it leak to aquifer or the environmental atmosphere. A lot of the fields being considered are old oil fields.”

According to those involved, 99 percent of carbon dioxide can be stored in the subsurface for 100 years.

These technological innovations may be too late though for coal energy. Dennis Simmers, plant engineer at Colver Power Project in Ebensburg, said the most recent data shows the coal-fired electric generation is in a distant third place to natural gas and nuclear energy as producers of electricity. Gas and nuclear are almost tied. It wasn’t all that long ago that coal and nuclear were neck-and-neck, with gas in third place.

“Carbon sequestration may arrive too late for the coal-fired electric generating industry,” Simmers said. “Furthermore, carbon dioxide is not currently a regulated pollutant, per se. Coal-fired electric generating stations have their hands full with the currently regulated pollutants, and their associated pollution control laws.”