Last week we heard reports that FutureGen, a multi-billion dollar project to demonstrate the feasibility of "clean coal" would at last be getting underway. The project would generate electricity from coal and pump CO2 deep underground, where it would remain forever imprisoned by thousands of feet of impermeable rock. The project would be sited near Mattoon, Illinois.
Greens and other environmentalists were opposed to the project, but their objections had been swept aside, and the project would go forward.
Thanks to the efforts of Illinois Senator Durbin and the good offices of the Obama Administration, there would be smooth sailing ahead.
A study published this week casts doubt on the workability of CO2 sequestration schemes. The study by Gilfillan, et al, appears in Nature. CO2 will escape underground confinement via underground aquifers.
In a sign of the importance Nature's editors attach to the study, they published an explanatory article Clean Coal and Sparkling Water by Werner Aeschbach-Hertig. CO2 sequestration projects should not be sited in rock formations which have water in them, he says.
Aeschbach-Hertig says in his blog that he does not believe the study will have any great consequences for the future of clean coal technology. There may be consequences for the FutureGen project, however. Mattoon is located in the Midwest, an area abundantly supplied with sub-surface aquifers.
Nature's Cover featured a picture of a CO2 geyser, accidentally triggered "when a water well was drilled into a CO2-saturated aquifer." The editors asked "how safe and how efficient is burial?"
