News Home | New York Stories | The Record | Archives | Submit Story Ideas | About |

July 15, 2008

Columbia Scientists Find Undersea Volcanic Rocks May Offer Vast Repository for Greenhouse Gas

 

A group of scientists at Columbia has used deep ocean-floor drilling and experiments to show that volcanic rocks off the West Coast and elsewhere might be used to securely sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, captured from power plants or other sources. In particular, they say that natural chemical reactions under 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of ocean floor off California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia could lock in as much as 150 years of U.S. carbon dioxide production. The findings are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Interest in so-called carbon sequestration is growing worldwide. However, no large-scale projects are yet off the ground, and other geological settings could be problematic. For instance, the petroleum industry has been pumping carbon dioxide into voids left by old oil wells on a small scale, but some fear that these might eventually leak, putting gas back into the air and possibly endangering people nearby.

 

Lead author David Goldberg, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, called the study "the first good evidence that this kind of carbon burial is feasible."

 

"We are convinced that the sub-ocean floor is a significant part of the solution to the global climate problem," said Goldberg. "Basalt reservoirs are understudied. They are immense, accessible and well sealed—a huge prize in the search for viable options." One of the main advantages, he said, is a chemical process that takes place between basalt and pumped-in liquid carbon dioxide that would form a solid, nontoxic mineral. Basalt is rock formed by solidified lava.