| Giant carbon sausages could bury carbon in sea |
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2008-02-18, 10:25:26 "Imagine a gigantic, inflatable, sausage-like bag capable of storing 160 million tonnes of CO2..." Even if scientist David Keith's vision of these bags isn't as catchy as John Lennon's song, it could actually make a big difference in the world, by offering a way of ridding our atmosphere of carbon dioxide, the pesky greenhouse gas that's heating up the planet. He argues that these sausage-like bags could be cheaply filled with liquid CO2, then sunk to the sea floor where they'd stay (we hope) for a long time. This CO2 could be captured from coal-fired power plants or other sources, and preventing the gas from going into the atmosphere would keep it from worsening ongoing global warming. “There are a lot of gee-whiz ideas for dealing with global warming that are really silly,” said Keith, a professor at the University of Calgary. “At first glance this idea looks nutty, but as one looks closer it seems that it might technically feasible with current-day technology.” For it to work, you'd need to find placid spots on the ocean floor for the sausages to sit, where they won't get punctured. Keith believes the carbon sausages offer a viable solution because vast flat plains cover huge areas of the deep oceans. These abyssal plains have little life and are benign environments, according to a press release. “If you stay away from the steep slopes from the continental shelves, they are a very quiet environment," Keith says. The bags themselves could be cheap, Keith argues—with existing polymers, less than four cents per ton of carbon. But they'd still have to work out how to cheaply capture the CO2, and then compress it to a liquid form. "If we can drive those [costs] down,” Keith said, “then ocean storage might be an important option for reducing CO2 emissions." Link to Eurekalert press release
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