Sunday, 20 November 2011

Carbon Capture

I recently read a newspaper article about carbon capture in East Yorkshire, and it looked really interesting:

Route of proposed carbon dioxide capture pipe announced

So basically, they plan to pipe carbon dioxide in liquid form into porous rocks off the Holderness Coast. I suppose this is similar to the carbon capture and storage system that has been reviewed quite a bit recently. This seems like a really good plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere I believe, although I wonder if it'll eventually become a disincentive to cut carbon dioxide production in plants.

However, there is this one news report from Click Green that believes that there are other trade offs from carbon dioxide capture and storage:

Carbon Capture will increase air pollution

The full EEA report can be found here:

Air pollution impacts from carbon capture and storage (CCS)

But as mentioned, CCS is a mid term mitigation solution as we transition to a low carbon economy (if we do so at all), but it has further repercussions on air quality and other dangerous pollutants. So is this the way we would like to go? At this point, I still think its a good short term measure if, say, carbon dioxide is certainly having the largest impact on the warming of the earth. But if it is to stay as our method for controlling carbon dioxide indefinitely, we will certainly have to face many other problems in the future.

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