CO2 sequestration will be legislated soon and several methods have been suggested for dealing with the gas.  All treat carbon dioxide or carbon as garbage or pollution and all are expensive.  
            The most practical concept has been thought to put the gas into old oil wells for the purpose of pushing more oil out of the rocks.  That works up to a point, but at the very high pressures of very deep wells CO2 is miscible with oil, dissolves into it completely.  The solution of oil and gas separate as soon as the oil comes to the surface and this will not be allowed under anti CO2 laws.

        An additional step of capturing the gas before the oil can be shipped will have to be done.  In all these processes some CO2 comes with any oil recovered with the gas.  Provision for recapture has to be engineered in any case where CO2 is use to recover oil.  For this reason we do not expect these schemes will be allowed or considered viable.  The only other scheme using old oil wells is simply as a dump.  Norway has officially proposed using their old North Sea oil wells purely as carbon dioxide vaults and have done so experimentally.  This will work, but it is not cheap and sees CO2 as waste instead of a valuable product.

        Pumping the gas into old caves has been suggested, but where many of these have not been fully explored questions arrise:  "What may we be burying with the gas?"  "What evidence of previous civilizations may we seal from science?"  And even more importantly with so little known of the caves could we be pumping the gas in one end only to have it escape from another opening?  That pressure is not rising as we pump gas into a cavern would be an indication, but how do we solve the problem and insure the investment in making a seal at the opening we know.  Suppose a second opening is high on the side of a mountain impossible to seal?  The problems we walk into with this approach are not only many, but unknown, expensive and potentially harmful to some plant or animal species.
     
        In any case we are going to have to store the captured gas for some time in tanks.  High pressure gas tanks are not inexpensive and occasionly  spring leaks.  One alternative is to use the solid hydroxide of our NatroX™ process, which compresses the gas as well as pumps generating over 8,000 pounds per square inch, then wet and heated to recover the gas in the field. Heating carbonates generates a lot of gas and pressure from a low volume solid weighing two and one-half times as much as water per unit volume.

         We are confident there will be many solutions to these problems before the optimum paths are found competitively.

           
          Pumping CO2 into oil wells, mines and caverns and even under the sea off Norway has been done.  The processes are expensive, inconvenient and unreliable due to high pressures, leaks and blowouts.  Old wells are not always close to the facilities capturing carbon dioxide so transportation costs can be significant. 

This method does not deal with elemental carbon or “carbon black” from high temperature atomic reduction systems, the most common method and one that cuts burner efficiency by raising the fuel to air ratio.  Chemical capture systems will prevail as they are cheaper and produce a salable product.

In Japan the Frio Brine Pilot test well was drilled to 4900 feet before it found permeable sandstone that would accept gas for sequestering.  At the half million dollars these wells cost this is clearly not a practical system.

Carbon is chemically bound in plants by photosynthesis and kept until it is burned, eaten or decays.  It is as sequestered as anything can be.  Every stick of wood is 44% sequestered carbon and possibly forever.  There are carvings and furniture from the antiquity of both the old and new worlds.  In fact wood is not forever, but with so much of the newer wood and laminated materials in use and recycled once captured as wood the carbon is pretty well fixed for a long time.

What Will Be

Where carbon sequestration is now called for by environmentalists, treaties and soon laws, carbon sequestration will be a popular and mandated business, but one doing a right thing for a wrong reason in our opinion. (See Science of Global Warming)  However, by the time the error is known the benefits of SCAF will be undeniable and the policies continued for tax revenues.  The economy will have expanded such that our elected class will take a vacation from runaway greed.   Taxes are forever according to the great American philosophers Mark Twain, H.L. Menken and Will Rogers.  They have yet to be seen wrong.

With 2.26 billion acres in the United States:  33% in forest, 26% in grasslands and 20% in crops we will need a lot of carbon and carbon dioxide for SCAF.  If SCAF only recovers 75% of the dry grasslands for agriculture it will have doubled crops in cultivation.  With this technology we think 100% of all dry grassland and much desert will be converted to cropland.  

Without SCAF global warming sequestration would glut the carbon dioxide supply market and be looking for places to put excess gas.  With captured CO2, as gas or carbonates, we can recover lands poisoned by years of irrigation that left salt residues insufficiently leached for lack of water.  The gas converts heavy metal alkalies to insoluble carbonates while carbonizing subsoil may give us encapsulated lighter alkali ions in Bucky Balls.  This will much improve soils lacking humus to recover them for agriculture.

$100 Per Ton?

 The Department of Energy now estimates carbon sequestration cost at $100 per ton.  We think this is a low figure, but an increase should not harm the economics.  As pollution carbon dioxide will certainly be taxed at a higher rate to force sequestration.  Substantial tax credits will have to be granted for capturing elemental carbon and chemically binding carbon dioxide.  These tax credits will be salable or the Carbon Dioxide Company, CO2Co™, or Carbon Dioxide Exchange, CO2Ex™.

There will be some multiple of $15 billion in new taxes and credits to be managed annually by the government where we generate 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year.  This is more than enough to well carbonate every acre in cultivation in the US, recover lands lost to alkali accumulation, farm new lands and have an exportable CO2  surplus.  History shows the tax total is likely to be between $300 billion and $1 trillion when Congress fixes it.

The automobile, power plants and other stationary internal combustion engines output a major portion of our CO2.  For them we have invented what we call NatroX™ systems.  To see what they are and how they work click on> NatroX™