Brits want to store carbon dioxide under North Sea
The British government announced today that it will invest about $45 million in technology to capture carbon dioxide and store it under the North Sea — part of a $72 million commitment to combat global warming via energy efficiency, renewables, and new technologies. Keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere — known as carbon sequestration — usually involves channeling it deep underground. Ironically, the North Sea bed is considered a perfect zone for carbon capture because of all the empty space left when oil and gas there was extracted (a company in Norway has been running a carbon capture project in the North Sea since 1996). Carbon capture is not a shortcut to solving the greenhouse crisis, but it holds big promise: Effective, large-scale sequestration could cut U.K. power-plant emissions by up to 85 percent and give Scotland a new multimillion-dollar business as the U-Store-It of CO2.
