Rethinking carbon capture and sequestration

Published 2016-01-06

Capturing CO2 and injecting it in the subsurface is often presented as a major tool to prevent man-made global warming. Several successful pilot projects on carbon sequestration have been carried. In order to assess the degree to which this technique can have an impact on mitigation of man-made global warming, one needs to consider the amount of CO2 that needs to be injected. This leads to a number of questions that must be answered before this carbon capture and sequestration can be used on a scale that actually makes a difference in preventing climate change. (1) How can the cost of this process be reduced from its projected cost of 150 billion dollars per year? (2) How can the capture and injection be up-scaled by a factor of 1000 beyond current capabilities? (3) How can we predict and monitor leakage? Many action alternative to carbon capture and sequestration likely to be much cheaper and save energy as well.

This talk was presented on April 10, 2013 as part of the IHS Markit Seminar Series, co-sponsored with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

About the speaker:

Roel Snieder holds the Keck Foundation Endowed Chair of Basic Exploration Science at the Colorado School of Mines. He received in 1984 a Masters degree in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from Princeton University, and in 1987 a Ph.D. in seismology from Utrecht University. In 1993 he was appointed as professor of seismology at Utrecht University, where from 1997-2000 he was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Earth Sciences. In 1997 he was a visiting professor at the Center for Wave Phenomena. Roel served on the editorial boards of Geophysical Journal International, Inverse Problems, and Reviews of Geophysics. In 2000 he was elected as Fellow of the American Geophysical Union for important contributions to geophysical inverse theory, seismic tomography, and the theory of surface waves. He is author of the textbooks "A Guided Tour of Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences" and "The Art of Being a Scientist" that are published by Cambridge University Press. Since 2000 he is a firefighter in Genesee Fire Rescue.

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