Mar 31, 2008 05:50 AM in Basic Science | 1 comments
Man-made trees and shells will save us from climate change
By David Biello
"Without carbon capture and storage, fossil energy is doomed," Lackner said at the State of the Planet conference. But what to do with the carbon after you've captured it? "If nothing else, we can inject it into the ground," he said. "But I'm not entirely convinced that we can deal with 2,000 billion tons of CO2, and that is the scale at which we have to operate."
Instead, Lackner suggests we imitate the shell-making creatures of the sea and sequester all that carbon in carbonates. The process is simple chemistry, albeit chemistry that requires energy to make it happen, all that's left is to demonstrate it"and the capture side of things"on real coal-fired power plants or in vast farms of CO2-scrubbing towers. That is not something the Bush administration has shown much interest in of late, most recently scrapping the FutureGen power plant that would have demonstrated similar technology. "Things were getting more serious," Lackner noted, "and they said: 'Don't bother us, we are only pretending to do something.'"
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