Letters to the Editor

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Who says burying carbon dioxide in caverns beneath the sea will never work? Norway's been doing it for a decade
  • not as scary

    At first, I thought they were doing "deep ocean" sequestration. Luckily, they are shoving it a kilometer under the sea bed.

    The deep sea plan, where deep ocean waters absorb the CO2 really worries me. The reason isn't that we get carbonated sea water. It's that we get acid.

    My own back of the envelope calculations show that the best carbon sequestration scheme is to leave it in the ground. Taking it out and putting it back in another form is a loser. The only time putting it back really makes sense for anyone is when CO2 injection increases the yield of nearby oil/gas wells.

    If I were a policy maker, I'd defund exploring sequestration and put it into renewables. It is much smarter to leave as much carbon (oil, coal, and gas) underground as possible. We can worry about sequestering past decades' excess after we quit disturbing the stuff that was stored millions of years ago.