Geologic Storage

In 1997, President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol along with leaders from most industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse emission to a combined of 5% below the 1990 emission level. The reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere was hoped to slow down global warming.

In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the treaty, no doubt pleasing the energy industry and infuriating environmentalists.

I was surprised when I saw the Kyoto Protocol mentioned in a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Energy giant BP operating in the Sahara desert (Algeria) is hoping to comply with the Kyoto Protocol by storing underground about 30 percent of CO2 produced by its natural gas-processing reactors.

Carbon dioxide burial, or geologic storage, was an idea which fascinated me when I was a chemical enginnering student. The WSJ article failed to convince me to change my opposition to geologic storage. First, I see this practice as a safety issue. If the compressed CO2 is leaked, we will see a man-made vocalno. Second, the storage capacity of the BP facility is only a drop in a bucket. Right in the same article, the author cited that the world releases 25 billion tons of CO2 compared to one million ton a year that BP plans to store.

Geologic storage is a temporary fix. The solution is still to find alternative engergy sources.