Pangea-era rift makes East Coast perfect for carbon storage

As the years tick by with most of the planet doing little in the way of reducing carbon emissions, researchers are getting increasingly serious about the possibility of carbon sequestration. If it looks like we’re going to be burning coal for decades, carbon sequestration offers us the best chance of limiting its impact on climate change and ocean acidification. A paper that will appear in today’s PNAS describes a fantastic resource for carbon sequestration that happens to be located right next to many of the US’ major urban centers on the East Coast.

Assuming that capturing the carbon dioxide is financially and energetically feasible, the big concern becomes where to put it so that it will stay out of the atmosphere for centuries. There appear to be two main schools of thought here. One is that areas that hold large deposits of natural gas should be able to trap other gasses for the long term. The one concern here is that, unlike natural gas, CO₂ readily dissolves in water, and may escape via groundwater that flows through these features. The alternative approach turns that problem into a virtue: dissolved CO₂ can react with minerals in rocks called basalts (the product of major volcanic activity), forming insoluble carbonate minerals. This should provide an irreversible chemical sequestration.