WASHINGTON — Reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere is an increasingly urgent concern for environmentalists, but a relatively new technology can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground.
The Department of Energy recently approved groundbreaking for construction of the largest carbon capture and storage facility in the nation, which will use a process called “carbon capturing.”
“This CCS technology is still being tested before being developed on a commercial scale for power plant and industrial facilities,” a spokesperson for the Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory said.
Carbon capturing and storage (CCS) is the process of taking carbon dioxide emissions from sites such as fossil fuel power plants and factories and depositing them into the earth instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. The facility acts like a giant tree that takes in CO2 from the atmosphere, but the gas is then compressed and stored underground in geological formations.
The Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory received $141 million in stimulus funding and another $66.5 million from the private sector to manage the new facility in Decatur, Ill., to recycle carbon emissions form an ethanol fuel production plant. The facility has the potential to sequester approximately 2,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide per day.
“It sounds like this is going to be a huge facility. It can potentially capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from all ethanol production plants in America,” said Jim Murphy, president of the bioenergy solutions company Carbon Green.
The Office of Fossil Energy is already managing several test projects nationwide. But some environmentalists question whether physically removing CO2 from the atmosphere is more pressing than curtailing emissions.
“I understand the investment interest if CCS was to be implemented today,” said Matt Roney, research associate at the Earth Policy Institute. “But we are running out time and we don’t know when it will be a viable on a commercial level.”
Roney said developing renewable energy sources is more of a priority among environmental scientists
“We need to level off on our carbon emissions first, and then think about ways to bring that level down,” Roney said.
Sequestering carbon dioxide from a facility that produces ethanol – a clean fuel created from fermented corn – creates what is called a “negative carbon footprint” instead of a neutral one. Environmental scientists prefer facilities which don’t emit much or any CO2 at all.
“Everybody is so focused on the growth and expansion of greenhouse gases, that they’re not worried about making it negative yet,” Murphy said. “We have so much to do to slow the rate of growth that making it carbon negative is still many years away.”