Linking science with new policies for CCS
Science, engineering, and policy research should go hand in hand.
In a world that continues to rely on coal as an energy source, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has been embraced by many as a promising option for reducing rising CO2 emissions and combating global warming. Yet use of CCS on a large scale raises a mountain of legal and regulatory questions. New research published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es062272t) suggests that these issues need as much attention as the technology itself and puts forth several areas where the scientific underpinnings of regulatory and legal decision making can be strengthened.
"If there is a real conversation between people on the policy side and people on the science side, then we can begin to develop" some guidelines for these relatively new, large-scale CCS projects, says coauthor Julio Friedmann of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). "Holding off addressing the policy issues until the science is set is going to hold up the process."
The concept behind CCS is simple, the authors write: capture CO2 emissions and inject them in a supercritical state into deep geologic formations, where the carbon is likely to stay put for hundreds of thousands of years. Reservoirs for such geologic sequestration are plentiful throughout the world; the best injection spots are deep saline aquifers, depleted oil and gas formations, and coal seams.
Yet an abundance of legal and regulatory issues arise from the many phases of a CCS project, which include capturing, transporting, and injecting the CO2 and closing a site. Issues also include responsibility for possible, but not necessarily likely, CO2 leakage if the original injecting company has shut down, ownership of the land and minerals in the land above a reservoir, and ownership of the pores filled by injected CO2.
Guidelines for monitoring leakage and accounting for the gas in a regulatory emissions cap-and-trade program also need to be hashed out, the authors say. These types of issues are compounded by varying state rules governing underground rights and injection. Before CCS can be used on a broad scale, investors and the public need certainty and assurances that CSS will be done safely and efficiently, they add.
In the new ES&T paper, the authors focus on two areas of research: surface leakage of CO2 and groundwater quality. They present two case studies of analog sites in which an injection well or abandoned well failed in conjunction with a large volume of naturally occurring CO2. Leakage can occur, notes coauthor Elizabeth Wilson of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when CO2 migrates to the surface through abandoned well bores or through faults or fractures in the rock. Yet current regulations don't cover human and ecological risks from this leakage, she says. Ensuring that protocols are in place to deal with such an event is key to CCS's success. "CCS must be integrated into a larger regime, where public perception is very important," Wilson says.
John Venezia of the nonprofit think tank World Resources Institute (WRI) agrees, saying, "What we don't want to do is to start off with a project without having uniform standards. If there is some leakage down the line, it will generate a very bad perception about CCS, and people won't trust it." WRI is working with a diverse group ranging from academics to insurers to devise uniform protocols for the many stages of CCS. Although CCS is a very promising technology, it is just "one of many arrows in the quiver" that can be used against global warming, Venezia adds.
Several government agencies are already working on incorporating science into policy development. Sean Plasynski of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Energy Technology Laboratory notes that DOE's 10-year-old program, funded at $100 million for the current fiscal year, has several small CO2 injection pilot projects in place. DOE has seven regional partnerships in its Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships program that involve 350 state agencies, universities, and private companies spanning 41 states and 4 Canadian provinces. The observations from these pilots will support policy and regulatory issues, Plasynski says.
The U.S. EPA has a smaller yet significant program dealing with the permits needed before a new injection site begins operations, the authors note. EPA staff are developing permits for DOE's CO2 injection pilots using the long-standing underground injection well program developed for hazardous and other wastes; this might be expanded nationally to include CO2 geological sequestration, Wilson says.
