By Valerie Brown
High Country News
Environmental engineer Pete McGrail's work is part of the Big
Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership, a consortium led by Montana State
University and drawing on researchers from all three of Idaho's universities,
the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls, and
Battelle. The DOE and several private companies have given $17.9 million to the
Big Sky partnership, which covers the eastern halves of Washington and Oregon,
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota and is one of six regional programs
covering the whole country. A map of the entire Big Sky region shows only 21
major industrial sources of CO2 within the Columbia basalt. But the area is
surrounded by more than 100 major sources. And because the economics of energy
and sequestration discourage long-range transport of CO2, the Columbia Plain may
wind up hosting many new coal-fired power plants, sited there specifically to
be close to sequestration opportunities.
(There may, of course, be state-to-state variations in
permitting. Oregon "is opposed to [new] coal plants" for several
reasons, including their release of mercury to the environment, says Dirk
Dunning, an environmental engineer with the Oregon Department of Energy. John
Stormon, a Washington Department of Ecology hydrogeologist, says that under new
legislation, Washington will accept coal plants provided they "address and
reduce their CO2 emissions.")
McGrail says he is unaware of any specific plans to build
energy facilities that would sequester CO2 in basalt, but he does concede that
geosequestration "will dramatically change the siting picture" for
energy production. Electricity from coal-fired, CO2-sequestering plants in the
Columbia basalt region could feed the power grid throughout the Western United
States. Once again, it seems, the Northwest's massive intermountain desert may become
the waste receptacle for interests beyond its borders. On the other hand,
assuming the unintended consequences of basalt sequestration remain minor, the
region is likely to benefit from the resulting jobs and economic growth.
But we're a long way from knowing how CO2 will behave in actual
basalt formations, a state of ignorance that will be reduced by the outcome of
McGrail's field test.
The search for a solution to the climate crisis demonstrates
that we need to know a lot more about what lies beneath us. Perhaps ironically,
the deepest such knowledge resides in the fossil fuel industries themselves,
which for many years have injected CO2 routinely into oil and gas wells to push
hydrocarbons to the surface. Doing this, however, has not necessarily required the
CO2 to stay buried for the lengths of time required to slow the greenhouse
effect. The Department of Energy's 2006 Carbon Sequestration Roadmap sets a
goal of less than a 1 per cent escape after 100 years. An earlier escape would
nullify the benefits of the sequestered CO2, not to mention that CO2 would be
emitted during the process of injection, McGrail says.
Although generally considered nontoxic, CO2 can harm vegetation
and subsurface organisms. Soil organisms are adapted to the naturally higher
CO2 content of their environment, but they can be killed by higher-than-normal
concentrations. In large volumes, of course, CO2 can be lethal to large
organisms, too. In 1986, a massive natural CO2 release from the bottom of Lake
Nyos in Cameroon suffocated about 1,800 people.
Explosive releases of CO2 from sequestration sites are highly
unlikely, provided the target formation is properly characterized and
monitored, Peridas says. The main concern is that leaks would return CO2 to the
atmosphere, reversing the benefits of the process.
Another worry about injecting CO2 involves the contamination of
shallow groundwater used for drinking and irrigation. The very mineral leaching
that is desirable for sequestering CO2 deep underground would make drinking
water unpalatable, so it's imperative to determine the risk of communication
between aquifers of different character. Most injection will be into deep
aquifers that are already too brackish or saline for human use due to eons of
chemical reactions with the rocks. But if underground equilibrium is disturbed,
pressure from injected CO2 might "add the energy that could allow the
mineralized water to migrate into one of the shallow aquifers," Stormon
says.
Or, in standard English: Carbon dioxide injection could cause
undrinkable, salty aquifers to contaminate groundwater consumed by humans.
And earthquakes may also pose problems: The increased pressure
of intruding CO2 on rock formations can trigger an earthquake, or a natural
earthquake could enlarge existing cracks and faults or create new ones in
sequestration zones. Most geosequestration researchers, including McGrail,
consider earthquakes a minor risk in the Columbia basalt. But there have been
instances of induced quakes elsewhere. In the 1960s, the U.S. Army injected
about 165 million gallons of liquid toxic waste from munitions manufacture into
a formation under the Denver basin. From 1962 to 1967, there were some 1,500
seismic "events" centered on the injection area, including three
earthquakes at or above Richter magnitude 5.
As to natural seismicity, McGrail says, extensive monitoring at
Hanford shows that most earthquakes in the region are weak, sparse and random.
The Columbia basalt is a few hundred miles from the complex subduction zone
along the Pacific Coast, where the North American plate, the Juan de Fuca plate
and the Pacific plate are sumo wrestling. Dunning, who is involved with Hanford
safety issues, says when that zone experiences its next magnitude 9 earthquake
— due any time — the Hanford area would be rattled by a "5-plus"
shock. It's not clear what effect this would have on the Columbia basalt.
McGrail's confidence in the safety of basalt sequestration has
been strengthened by tests showing that air and water have remained trapped in
basalt pores for millions of years without mixing between formations. McGrail
says this is good evidence that the basalt has been "undisrupted by
seismicity," and that the injected CO2 will not migrate out of its target
formation.
Still, many environmentalists are concerned about potential
side effects. They are even more worried about other aspects of carbon
sequestration.
"If (sequestration) were a simple solution to a
complicated problem," says Sierra Club spokesman Josh Dorner, "people
would already be using it." Still, he says, "we would love it if it
turned out to work." The Sierra Club opposes new coal-fired power plants
unless they sequester 100 per cent of their emissions, Dorner says.
"It will take so much time to test it," Friends of
the Earth spokesman Nick Berning notes. "There's an urgency about
addressing global warming that demands that we take steps that can make a
difference now, moving to cleaner energy, wind, solar, and conservation. We
know wind power can generate energy with zero carbon emissions. We know solar
can."
Regardless of any given site's geology, nobody knows how well
the earth's crust will tolerate being saturated with CO2 in the volumes
necessary to slow global warming. For his part, McGrail stresses that many
basic questions must be satisfactorily answered before any large-scale CO2
sequestration in basalt can begin. His data, he says, "are compelling, but
I would not regard it as sufficient proof of analogous isolation for CO2
storage until we have some field data to support it.”
Lifestyle conflicts
Today, Richland looks much like many of the other Western
cities that have been transformed by rapid growth in the last 20 years. Along
the Columbia in the middle of town, joggers traverse a pleasant esplanade, past
gaggles of Canada geese and their goslings. Young people drift along downtown
sidewalks wearing Goth markers: black lipstick, neck chains, body piercings.
Traffic is congested. Every summer there are hydroplane races on the river.
Agriculture has changed, too: The Columbia basalt is now home
to a burgeoning wine industry, second in America only to California's Napa
Valley. Vineyards seem to cover every south-facing hillside, and grapes love
the soil. The wineries are building Spanish- and Italian-style villas atop
hillcrests to lure foodie tourists. Under the influence of viniculture's
transplanted European rusticity, the landscape has lost some of its harsh Old
Testament quality. The wine influence is echoed in the Tri-Cities' many new
housing developments, where mushrooming McMansions often look more like
McChateaux.
The region's growth doesn't please everyone. Thirty miles east
of the Tri-Cities, the once-sleepy town of Walla Walla has changed beyond the
recognition of long-term residents. In the spirit of the "Don't
Californicate Oregon" campaign of the 1970s and 1980s, "Don't Bend
Walla Walla" stickers shout from bumpers — a reference to Bend, Ore.,
whose explosive growth has caused similar distress to its locals.
In late June, the site of McGrail's sequestration field test
was finally revealed: Wallula, Wash., a few miles south of the Tri-Cities on
the east bank of the Columbia River just below its confluence with the Snake
and Yakima rivers. McGrail's team will inject 3,000 tons of CO2 into the Grande
Ronde formation of the Columbia basalt at a depth of 3,000 feet or more.
The site, an industrial park, has easy access to hydropower,
rail lines and the Columbia River. Energy producers have taken notice: A new
Gig Harbor, Washington-based energy consortium called the Wallula Energy Resource
Center has announced plans to build a $2 billion state-of-the-art power plant
near the test site. It would be an integrated gasification combined cycle
coal-fired power plant with 600-700 megawatts of capacity. The power plant
would use McGrail's test site to sequester 65 per cent of its CO2. If the
Byzantine energy-facility permitting process goes well, the plant could be
operating by 2013.
Some Washington environmental organizations share the doubts of
the national groups about the "clean coal" scenario. Sequestration is
"unproven, it's expensive, and it's going to add some costs and risks for
Washington utilities and residents," says Paul Horton, executive director
of Climate Solutions, an Olympia, Washington-based nonprofit. "We'd rather
enable other kinds of investments, a smarter way of using energy."
Indeed, any successful geosequestration technology risks
enabling a continued reliance on fossil fuels, even though most experts agree
that climate change requires action on many fronts, including a reduction in
the use of hydrocarbons. If geosequestration works, keeping the good news from
seeming like a panacea will be difficult. Some cynics even suspect that coal
interests will promise sequestration to get their permits — and then renege
after the plants are built, claiming it would be too costly.
Horton, however, thinks that in the near future Washington
state's new regulations and federal climate policies will bring "legal
limits and caps." These new guidelines will change the price of power,
making renewables and energy efficiency much more competitive. "The rules
of the game change at that point," he says.
But even if it works perfectly, CO2 sequestration of any sort
won't be the Holy Grail of global warming; McGrail stresses that all the other
options have to be employed as well, from energy conservation to alternative
energy sources. Geosequestration, he says, is just "the linchpin that
finally gets us to stable (atmospheric) CO2."
It will take about three years to get an idea of how well
McGrail's lab tests and calculations have predicted the behavior of CO2 in
basalt under real-world conditions. If things go well, perhaps basalt's
poor-relation status will change, and its main champion will go down in history
as the "Holy McGrail" of carbon sequestration, a designation his
multi-layered diffidence would surely resist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerie Brown, a science writer and musician, lives near
Portland, Oregon. She grew up on Idaho's Snake River flood basalt; her
grandfather ran sheep on Oregon's Columbia River basalt in the early 20th
century; and her geologist father intensely studied gabbro, a close relative of
basalt, in a formation on the Oregon-Idaho border.
This story first appeared in High Country News in September.