As progress is made to reduce emissions from cars and trucks, the focus of scientists and regulators is turning to off-road vehicles. Now there may be a new method to capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural equipment – by injecting it straight into the soil.

A report from the Australian newspaper The Age on a novel home-grown carbon capture technology with unexpected benefits.
A emission-capturing, crop-boosting technology is developed and promoted by the Canadian firm N/C Quest Inc. under the label “Bio-Agtive Emissions Technology.” In short, the process works like this: exhaust from agricultural off-road equipment is captured and cooled to ambient temperature, then injected into the soil through on-board pneumatic tubes. The exhaust emissions are reported benefit the soil by increasing the uptake of phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur, while providing fixed nitrogen to the crops.

The BAET method diverges from traditional carbon sequestration techniques, in which CO2 is stored in an underground cavity such as an oil well, or bubbled through and absorbed into the ocean. In contrast, the only way that agriculture stores carbon dioxide is through the growth of biomass.

Source

New research on deep saline storage will soon be underway at the CO2CRC Otway Project, Australia’s only CO2 geosequestration research and demonstration facility.

“The CO2CRC Otway Project has safely injected and stored over 65,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide two kilometres underground in a depleted gas field, demonstrating that stored carbon dioxide can be effectively monitored,” said Dr Peter Cook, Chief Executive of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC).

“Over the past year, researchers have been able to produce an accurate picture of the stored carbon dioxide as part of the project’s rigorous monitoring and verification program. The work has lead to new techniques that can be highly useful to commercial-scale projects in the future.”

Source

DOE’s Carbon Sequestration R&D Program expands with addition of three university-sponsored projects

The three projects were selected in a broad competition run by the Energy Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. They were submitted by:

* University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. Researchers in the University’s Department of Chemical Engineering will develop an alternative solvent that captures more carbon dioxide while using 25 to 50 percent less energy than conventional, state-of-the-art MEA (monoethanol amine) scrubbing, another CO2-removal method. Using less energy allows coal plants to produce more electricity while capturing and storing CO2. The university will develop and validate a process model to optimize solvent rate, stripper pressure and other parameters. Because gas/liquid contact and CO2 mass transfer would be enhanced, capital costs may be reduced.

* University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, which proposes to study in a laboratory a deep-ocean CO2-sequestration method that blends liquid CO2, water and finely ground limestone into an emulsion that could be pumped into the ocean for long-term storage. Because this emulsion would weigh more than seawater, it would sink to the deep ocean. This would make it possible to CO2 at shallower depths than current directed-injection techniques. Soluble calcium bicarbonate, food for aquatic organisms, would be formed and stored in the ocean indefinitely.

* University of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington, KY. The University proposes to displace natural gas from black Devonian shales and use these organic-rich rocks to store CO2. Studies have shown that CO2 is preferentially adsorbed by gaseous coals in deep, unminable coal seams in very much the same manner that gas is naturally stored in these coals. In fact, CO2 displaces methane molecules two to one. The study will determine whether a similar phenomena takes place in Devonian black shales, which serve as both a source and a trap for natural gas.

Source

A study of the role of the North Sea in providing storage space under the sea-bed for carbon dioxide from European countries was commissioned jointly by the UK and Norway. Lord Hunt and the Norwegian Minister Terje Riis-Johansen, met to agree on a clear vision for the potential role of the North Sea in the future deployment of CCS in Europe, at the conference on Climate Change and Technology in Bergen, Norway.

The study will look at how quickly the base of the North Sea could be needed for carbon dioxide storage and what the UK, Norway and other countries have to do to get it ready in time.

The aim of the study will be to build a profile for the whole of the North Sea, assessing each countries’ storage potential and projections of likely volumes and locations of CO2 flows, against a rising price of carbon.
More from here

Carbon microbubbles sequestration: A novel technology for stable underground emplacement of greenhouse gases into wide variety of saline aquifers, fractured rocks and tight reservoirs

Abstract

A novel economic leak-free underground injection technology of Greenhouse gas—the carbon (CO2) microbubbles sequesrtration can bring the deep reduction of greenhouse gas emission into reality around the world. The atomized foams of CO2 gas, CO2 supercritical fluid or CO2 liquid are dispersed deep into tiny pores of wide variety of underground rocks for virtually permanent storage. The gas microbubbles injection may be effective also for the EOR and EGR in tight rocks such as oil shale and gas shale. Combined effect of hardly buoyant carbon microbubbles, heavy carbon dioxide solution and various trapping mechanisms makes the carbon microbubbles sequestration stable and leak-free in wide variety of geology. The carbon microbubbles injection is suitable also to small scale sequestration of greenhouse gases in the coming hydrogen society as well as large scale CO2 storage from big coal-fired power plants.

The dispersion and dilution of CO2 in large volume of deep groundwater and rocks by scattered relatively small-scale carbon microbubbles injections are an earth-friendly strategy of greenhouse gas sequestration. The flexibility of site selection makes the source-sink matching much easier for the carbon microbubbles sequestration than conventional direct large-scale injection practices. As we can find the suitable site for the storage near of many large sources of carbon dioxide, the carbon microbubbles sequestration is practically energy-saving and cost-effective greenhouse gas reduction method in many regions. The carbon microbubbles injection can produce the reductive geochemical and biological environments in tiny pores of igneous (especially oceanic) rocks and sequestrate CO2 into carbonates, organics and methane in the similar mechanism to the Early Archaean earth. The autogenous sealing by carbonate trapping and by hydrate trapping provides the leak proof storage of anthropogenic CO2 in the deep oceanic crust.

The carbon microbubbles sequestration (CMS) provides the economig leak-free option of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and a break-through for the prevention of global warming.

Source

Was reading an article on carbon sequestration that has a focus on basalt rock formations on the coasts of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Add this a recent Popular Mechanics article comments on the potential for these rock formations to be the storage place for CO2. It says, “…a new scientific analysis suggests /that the related basalt formations buried under the U.S. East Coast and extending out to sea might someday be doing some critical trapping after all — of greenhouse gas emissions from the likes of giant coal-burning power plants.”

Basalt is capable of transforming CO2 dissolved in water into calcium carbonate, or limestone. This way, CO2 is stored in the form of stable carbonates for a very long period.

Results of the analysis published in a recent edition of The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences suggest that the basalt formations actually may be ideal for capturing billions of tons of CO2, with single basalt formations alone having the potential to capture almost a billion T.

That’s not a bad number at all. The world emits something about 35 billion T of CO2 per year, and the world will be keen to capture at least 10 billion T of these every year. If one basalt formation could store a billion T, with a large number of such formations world over, the potential could be sizable for the medium term. However, the worldwide capacity estimates for these basaltic rock formations that can store CO2 appear to be quite preliminary in nature.

This site gives the cost of storage alone at about $10 per T of CO2. However, this does not include cost of capture and transportation.

In terms of actual work on the ground, two such projects appear to have done some amount of work – the “Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership,” headed by a team including researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, the University of Idaho, Boise State University, Idaho State University, (Hickey), and “Carbfix,” a project in Iceland run by a team from the University of Iceland, Columbia University, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and Reykjavik Energy (CarbFix). (Source)

Guess just projects being out there does not augur too well for this area, but again, CCS efforts themselves are only about a decade old, so it will interesting to watch out the developments in the domain of basalt storage of CO2.