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 tha