24 July 2001

Energy Department Studies Ways
to Capture Heat-Trapping Emissions

By Jim Fuller
Washington File Science Correspondent

Bonn -- The private sector has responded enthusiastically to a U.S. initiative that will study ways to capture and store carbon dioxide -- one of the most potent greenhouse gases that causes global warming.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham recently announced eight new projects to explore a promising class of technologies that removes carbon dioxide from the exhausts of power plants and from the atmosphere itself, and then safely stores them -- a process known as carbon sequestration. The projects will be co-funded, with the Energy Department providing $25 million and the private sector more than $50 million.

The research projects are part of a series of initiatives announced by President Bush on June 11 to address the problem of climate change.

Carbon dioxide is a natural by-product of everything ranging from fossil fuel combustion and volcanoes to rotting vegetation and breathing. Its concentration in the atmosphere has been on the rise since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This has led to calls for cuts in carbon dioxide emissions -- by reducing fossil fuel use to developing more efficient technologies.

International negotiators in Bonn reached agreement July 23 on rules for implementing the Kyoto Protocol, which requires developed countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases -- mainly carbon dioxide -- by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Many scientists are looking for ways to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by locking it away. One idea is to pump the gas into underground aquifers or oil fields. Others want to consider exploiting the world's oceans, trees and soils as huge reservoirs for storing great quantities of the gas for long periods as a way to combat global warming.

The Energy Department's proposed projects will study ways to capture greenhouse gases -- mainly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels -- and store them in underground geologic formations or in terrestrial vegetation such as forests. The projects resulted from a nationwide competition that attracted 62 proposals from private companies, universities, local governments and environmental organizations.

The Energy Department recently signed public-private partnerships agreements for two of the chosen projects -- one put forward by British Petroleum Corporation (BP), which represents an international team of several of the world's leading energy companies. The other was submitted by The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest private international conservation group. Proposed projects have also been submitted by a variety of companies involved in power generation and energy efficiency technologies such as Alstom Power, Praxair, Consol, Dakota Gasification, and Advanced Resource International.

U.S. officials said private sector response to this effort to develop environmentally safe and affordable sequestration options has been overwhelming. Prior to the 62 proposals received in the latest competition, the Energy Department had evaluated a similar number of proposals in an earlier round of competition, eventually selecting 13 projects.

Officials said it was also significant that the private sector participants in the latest competition have offered to fund an average of about 40 percent of total project costs, well above the 20 percent minimum cost-sharing that the Energy Department required.

"Largely because of the growing commitment to this type of research by private industry and organizations, we have elevated carbon sequestration to one of our highest priorities in response to the president's National Climate Change Technology Initiative," Abraham said.

"Carbon sequestration is an important field of study because it offers a way to address global climate issues," he added. "Government research should be focused on those areas that industry tells us are worth pursuing. The large response and significant cost-sharing from the private sector is a clear message that carbon sequestration is an option worth examining."

The BP Corporation project, one of the largest, will focus the efforts of nine energy companies from four nations -- including Shell, Suncor Energy of Canada and ENI of Italy -- to demonstrate the feasibility of using potential breakthrough technologies to capture carbon dioxide from a variety of fuel types and combustion sources and storing it in unmineable coal seams and saline aquifers. A U.S. government contribution of $5 million will leverage an international commitment of $25 million over the next three years -- including funding from the European Union and Norway's Klimatek Program as well as the nine private industry partners.

Under The Nature Conservancy Project, the conservation group, in collaboration with companies such as General Motors Corporation and American Electric Power, will use newly developed technology and aerial photography to study forestry projects in Brazil and Belize to determine their carbon sequestration potential. Forests, oceans and soil, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are known as carbon "sinks." The U.S. government will provide $1.7 million of the $2 million cost of the three-year project.

Other U.S. agencies have also announced initiatives to advance the science of climate change. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is selecting 80 new projects that will receive more than $50 million over the next three years to conduct remote sensing research that will further science's understanding of the role sinks play in sequestering carbon and the impacts climate change has on agriculture, rangelands and forests.

The U.S. Department of Treasury has signed a debt-for-forest agreement with El Salvador that will generate more than $14 million in funds to protect tropical forests from deforestation. These forests sequester carbon dioxide and help mitigate climate change.

But scientists warn that while trees and soil are two of the largest sinks in which carbon can be sequestered, these sinks may not be as effective as advocates maintain. For example, one major risk to forests is wildfire, which can quickly release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

John Caspersen, an ecologist at Princeton University, said in a recent article published in Science that American forests acted as a sink for most of the 20th century because fire-suppression efforts decreased the frequency of forest fires. Caspersen said this sink could soon become a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide if fire-fighting policies change.

Even with current practices, a particularly bad fire season could be disastrous. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that U.S. fires scorched 3.2 million hectares in 2000, adding the equivalent of 100 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is more than one-third the amount of the gas soaked up by U.S. woodlands each year.