Energy Agency Plans International Carbon Sequestration Workshop

Capacity-building meeting to host 50 participants from six countries

By Cheryl Pellerin
USINFO Staff Writer

Graph shows carbon sequestration options, or ways to capture and store carbon dioxide. (White House graphic)

Washington ? The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is hosting an international workshop in May to help participants from six developing countries learn the basics of carbon sequestration ? a process of carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and long-term underground storage that someday could help reduce concentrations of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and slow global warming.

The meeting, organized by an international climate-change initiative called the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), will take place in Pittsburgh May 7-11 during the Sixth Annual Conference on Carbon Capture and Sequestration, an international meeting to be held there May 7-10.

As part of the workshop, said Justin “Judd” Swift, deputy assistant secretary for international affairs in DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and chairman of the CSLF Capacity-Building Task Force, attendees will sit in on sessions of the larger meeting, which expects 450 experts from state and federal agencies, research institutions, electric and natural gas utilities, the oil and gas industry and others.

“The United States is dedicated to the task force,” Swift added, “and we hope that other countries will join us in this and future capacity-building efforts.”

The CSLF was established in the United States in 2003. Its members are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. (See related article.)

Countries whose emerging economies could benefit from the May workshop include Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Mexico and South Africa.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

Carbon dioxide is produced when fossil fuels burn and animals exhale, and in fermentation and photosynthesis. Its presence in the atmosphere keeps some of Earth's radiant energy from returning to space and helps produce the greenhouse effect ? the rise in temperature that occurs when water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and ozone trap energy from the sun in the atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect makes life possible on Earth. But when concentrations of greenhouse gases like CO₂ increase too quickly, they can cause the Earth to overheat in a process called global warming.

Carbon sequestration is an attempt to reduce excess CO₂ in the atmosphere. Sequestration is a combination of technologies ? CO₂ capture and CO₂ storage. (See related article.)

In CO₂ capture, carbon dioxide is collected from emissions that arise from fossil-fueled power plants, refineries, fertilizer production plants and other industrial facilities. These are called anthropogenic emissions because they are created by human activities. The emissions are captured, the CO₂ is stripped out by chemical processes and the CO₂ is reused or stored.

There are different kinds of CO₂ storage, but CSLF members are focusing their CO₂ storage efforts on saline aquifers ? underground layers of gravel or porous stone that contain small amounts of salt water.

Once injected into these aquifers, the CO₂ is expected to stay there for centuries or longer. Geologists still are investigating what actually happens to the gas while it is underground.

CAPACITY BUILDING

The CSLF aims to develop cost-effective technologies for separating and capturing CO₂ for long-term storage, to make the technologies broadly available internationally and to address wider issues relating to broader regulatory and policy factors.

CSLF members have met many times since the 2003 inaugural meeting in Washington ? in Italy and Australia in 2004, Spain and Germany in 2005, India in 2006 and France in 2007.

To date, the forum has recognized nearly 20 projects undertaken by member nations, including a project by the United States and China to compile key characteristics of large human-generated CO₂ sources in China and geologic storage formations to develop estimates of geologic CO₂ storage capacities there.

Another project, by the United States and India, is a feasibility study of geological CO₂ sequestration in basalt formations in India to evaluate a range of noninvasive technologies for injecting and monitoring storage in these rock formations.

At the May workshop, attendees will receive a set of training resources, now being developed by DOE, that all CSLF members can use. The workshop agenda is based on feedback from invited nations about which capacity-building topics would be most useful, Swift said.

“One of the workshop discussions will be about what’s next,” said Scott Smouse, international coordination team leader at the DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania.

“This is a first-of-a-kind workshop being held in the United States,” he said, but each country will have a unique situation ? different geologic formations, opportunities for using CO₂ in industrial processes, power plants and cost structures.

“We don’t think every country will walk away from the event with every question answered,” he added, “but everyone will walk away with enough information to brief policymakers and decisionmakers and others who could not attend."

In the future, Smouse said, DOE hopes to be able to customize the training course for each country and present the courses to large local audiences in each nation.

More information about the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum is available on the organization’s Web site.

For more information about U.S. policies, see Climate Change and Clean Energy.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)