Carbon sequestration

Carbon sequestration is the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon sequestration describes long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide is naturally captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical, or physical processes. Artificial processes have been devised to produce similar effects, including large-scale, artificial capture and sequestration of industrially produced using subsurface saline aquifers, reservoirs, ocean water, aging oil fields, or other carbon sinks.

Description
Carbon sequestration is the process of capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide and may refer specifically to:
 * "The process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it in a reservoir." When carried out deliberately, this may also be referred to as carbon dioxide removal, which is a form of geoengineering.
 * Carbon capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is removed from flue gases (e.g., at power stations) before being stored in underground reservoirs.
 * Natural biogeochemical cycling of carbon between the atmosphere and reservoirs, such as by chemical weathering of rocks.

Carbon sequestration describes long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide is naturally captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical or physical processes. Some anthropogenic sequestration techniques exploit these natural processes, while some use entirely artificial processes.

Carbon dioxide may be captured as a pure by-product in processes related to petroleum refining or from flue gases from power generation. sequestration includes the storage part of carbon capture and storage, which refers to large-scale, artificial capture and sequestration of industrially produced using subsurface saline aquifers, reservoirs, ocean water, aging oil fields, or other carbon sinks.

Biological processes


Biosequestration or carbon sequestration through biological processes affects the global carbon cycle. Examples include major climatic fluctuations, such as the Azolla event, which created the current Arctic climate. Such processes created fossil fuels, as well as clathrate and limestone. By manipulating such processes, geoengineers seek to enhance sequestration.

Peat production
Peat bogs are a very important carbon store. By creating new bogs, or enhancing existing ones, carbon can be sequestered.

Reforestation
Reforestation is the replanting of trees on marginal crop and pasture lands to incorporate carbon from atmospheric into biomass. For this process to succeed the carbon must not return to the atmosphere from burning or rotting when the trees die. To this end, the trees must grow in perpetuity or the wood from them must itself be sequestered, e.g., via biochar, bio-energy with carbon storage (BECS) or landfill. Short of growth in perpetuity, however, reforestation with long-lived trees (>100 years) will sequester carbon for a more graduated release, minimizing impact during the expected carbon crisis of the 21st century.

Wetland restoration
Wetland soil is an important carbon sink; 14.5% of the world’s soil carbon is found in wetlands, while only 6% of the world’s land is composed of wetlands.

Agriculture
Globally, soils are estimated to contain approximately 1,500 gigatons of organic carbon to 1 m depth, more than the amount in vegetation and the atmosphere.

Modification of agricultural practices is a recognized method of carbon sequestration as soil can act as an effective carbon sink offsetting as much as 20% of 2010 carbon dioxide emissions annually. (See No-till)

Carbon emission reduction methods in agriculture can be grouped into two categories: reducing and/or displacing emissions and enhancing carbon removal. Some of these reductions involve increasing the efficiency of farm operations (e.g. more fuel-efficient equipment) while some involve interruptions in the natural carbon cycle. Also, some effective techniques (such as the elimination of stubble burning) can negatively impact other environmental concerns (increased herbicide use to control weeds not destroyed by burning).

Reducing emissions
Increasing yields and efficiency generally reduces emissions as well, since more food results from the same or less effort. Techniques include more accurate use of fertilizers, less soil disturbance, better irrigation, and crop strains bred for locally beneficial traits and increased yields.

Replacing more energy intensive farming operations can also reduce emissions. Reduced or no-till farming requires less machine use and burns correspondingly less fuel per acre. However, no-till usually increases use of weed-control chemicals and the residue now left on the soil surface is more likely to release its to the atmosphere as it decays, reducing the net carbon reduction.

In practice, most farming operations that incorporate post-harvest crop residues, wastes and byproducts back into the soil provide a carbon storage benefit. This is particularly the case for practices such as field burning of stubble - rather than releasing almost all of the stored to the atmosphere, tillage incorporates the biomass back into the soil.

Enhancing carbon removal
All crops absorb during growth and release it after harvest. The goal of agricultural carbon removal is to use the crop and its relation to the carbon cycle to permanently sequester carbon within the soil. This is done by selecting farming methods that return biomass to the soil and enhance the conditions in which the carbon within the plants will be reduced to its elemental nature and stored in a stable state. Methods for accomplishing this include:
 * Use cover crops such as grasses and weeds as temporary cover between planting seasons
 * Concentrate livestock in small paddocks for days at a time so they graze lightly but evenly. This encourages roots to grow deeper into the soil. Stock also till the soil with their hooves, grinding old grass and manures into the soil.
 * Cover bare paddocks with hay or dead vegetation. This protects soil from the sun and allows the soil to hold more water and be more attractive to carbon-capturing microbes.
 * Restore degraded land, which slows carbon release while returning the land to agriculture or other use.

Agricultural sequestration practices may have positive effects on soil, air, and water quality, be beneficial to wildlife, and expand food production. On degraded croplands, an increase of 1 ton of soil carbon pool may increase crop yield by 20 to 40 kilograms per hectare of wheat, 10 to 20 kg/ ha for maize, and 0.5 to 1 kg/ha for cowpeas.

The effects of soil sequestration can be reversed. If the soil is disrupted or tillage practices are abandoned, the soil becomes a net source of greenhouse gases. Typically after 15 to 30 years of sequestration, soil becomes saturated and ceases to absorb carbon. This implies that there is a global limit to the amount of carbon that soil can hold.

Many factors affect the costs of carbon sequestration including soil quality, transaction costs and various externalities such as leakage and unforeseen environmental damage. Because reduction of atmospheric is a long-term concern, farmers can be reluctant to adopt more expensive agricultural techniques when there is not a clear crop, soil, or economic benefit. Governments such as Australia and New Zealand are considering allowing farmers to sell carbon credits once they document that they have sufficiently increased soil carbon content.

Iron fertilization
Ocean iron fertilization is an example of such a geoengineering technique. Iron fertilization attempts to encourage phytoplankton growth, which removes carbon from the atmosphere for at least a period of time. This technique is controversial due to limited understanding its complete effects on the marine ecosystem, including side effects and possibly large deviations from expected behavior. Such effects potentially include release of nitrogen oxides, and disruption of the ocean's nutrient balance.

Natural iron fertilisation events (e.g., deposition of iron-rich dust into ocean waters) can enhance carbon sequestration. Sperm whales act as agents of iron fertilisation when they transport iron from the deep ocean to the surface during prey consumption and defecation. Sperm whales have been shown to increase the levels of primary production and carbon export to the deep ocean by depositing iron rich feces into surface waters of the Southern Ocean. The iron rich feces causes phytoplankton to grow and take up more carbon from the atmosphere. When the phytoplankton dies, some of it sinks to the deep ocean and takes the atmospheric carbon with it. By reducing the abundance of sperm whales in the Southern Ocean, whaling has resulted in an extra 2 million tonnes of carbon remaining in the atmosphere each year.

Urea fertilization
Ian Jones proposes fertilizing the ocean with urea, a nitrogen rich substance, to encourage phytoplankton growth.

Australian company Ocean Nourishment Corporation (ONC) plans to sink hundreds of tonnes of urea into the ocean to boost -absorbing phytoplankton growth as a way to combat climate change. In 2007, Sydney-based ONC completed an experiment involving 1 tonne of nitrogen in the Sulu Sea off the Philippines.

Mixing layers
Encouraging various ocean layers to mix can move nutrients and dissolved gases around, offering avenues for geoengineering. Mixing may be achieved by placing large vertical pipes in the oceans to pump nutrient rich water to the surface, triggering blooms of algae, which store carbon when they grow and export carbon when they die. This produces results somewhat similar to iron fertilization. One side-effect is a short-term rise in, which limits its attractiveness.

Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)
BECCS refers to biomass in power stations and boilers that use carbon capture and storage. The carbon sequestered by the biomass would be captured and stored, thus removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

This technology is sometimes referred to as bio-energy with carbon storage, BECS, though this term can also refer to the carbon sequestration potential in other technologies, such as biochar.

Burial
Burying biomass (such as trees ) directly, mimics the natural processes that created fossil fuels. Landfills also represent a physical method of sequestration.

Biochar burial
Biochar is charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass waste. The resulting material is added to a landfill or used as a soil improver to create terra preta. Biogenic carbon is recycled naturally in the carbon cycle. Pyrolysing it to biochar renders the carbon relatively inert so that it remains sequestered in soil. Further, the soil encourages bulking with new organic matter, which gives additional sequestration benefit.

In the soil, the carbon is unavailable for oxidation to and consequential atmospheric release. This is one technique advocated by scientist James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis. According to Simon Shackley, "people are talking more about something in the range of one to two billion tonnes a year."

The mechanisms related to biochar are referred to as bio-energy with carbon storage, BECS.

Ocean storage
River mouths bring large quantities of nutrients and dead material from upriver into the ocean as part of the process that eventually produces fossil fuels. Transporting material such as crop waste out to sea and allowing it to sink exploits this idea to increase carbon storage. International regulations on marine dumping may restrict or prevent use of this technique.

Subterranean injection
Carbon dioxide can be injected into depleted oil and gas reservoirs and other geological features, or can be injected into the deep ocean.

The first large-scale sequestration project which began in 1996 is called Sleipner, and is located in the North Sea where Norway's StatoilHydro strips carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposed of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. In 2000, a coal-fueled synthetic natural gas plant in Beulah, North Dakota, became the world's first coal-using plant to capture and store carbon dioxide, at the Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project.

has been used extensively in enhanced crude oil recovery operations in the United States beginning in 1972. There are in excess of 10,000 wells that inject in the state of Texas alone. The gas comes in part from anthropogenic sources, but is principally from large naturally occurring geologic formations of. It is transported to the oil-producing fields through a large network of over 5000 km of pipelines. The use of for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods in heavy oil reservoirs in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) has also been proposed. However, transport cost remains an important hurdle. An extensive pipeline system does not yet exist in the WCSB. Athabasca oil sands mining that produces is hundreds of kilometers north of the subsurface Heavy crude oil reservoirs that could most benefit from  injection.

Chemical processes
Developed in the Netherlands, an electrocatalysis by a copper complex helps reduce carbon dioxide to oxalic acid; This conversion uses carbon dioxide as a feedstock to generate oxalic acid.

Mineral Carbonation
Carbon, in the form of can be removed from the atmosphere by chemical processes, and stored in stable carbonate mineral forms. This process is known as 'carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation' or mineral sequestration. The process involves reacting carbon dioxide with abundantly available metal oxides–either magnesium oxide (MgO) or calcium oxide (CaO)–to form stable carbonates. These reactions are exothermic and occur naturally (e.g., the weathering of rock over geologic time periods).


 * CaO + →


 * MgO + →

Calcium and magnesium are found in nature typically as calcium and magnesium silicates (such as forsterite and serpentinite) and not as binary oxides. For forsterite and serpentine the reactions are:
 * + 2 = 2  +


 * + 3 = 3  + 2  + 2

The following table lists principal metal oxides of Earth's crust. Theoretically up to 22% of this mineral mass is able to form carbonates.

These reactions are slightly more favorable at low temperatures. This process occurs naturally over geologic time frames and is responsible for much of the Earth's surface limestone. The reaction rate can be made faster, for example by reacting at higher temperatures and/or pressures, or by pre-treatment, although this method requires additional energy. One experiment suggests this process is reasonably quick (one year) given porous basaltic rocks.

naturally reacts with peridotite rock in surface exposures of ophiolites, notably in Oman. It has been suggested that this process can be enhanced to carry out natural mineralisation of.

Industrial use
Traditional cement manufacture releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, but newly developed cement types from Novacem can absorb from ambient air during hardening. A similar technique was pioneered by TecEco, which has been producing "EcoCement" since 2002.

In Estonia, oil shale ash, generated by power stations could be used as sorbents for mineral sequestration. The amount of captured averaged 60 to 65% of the carbonaceous  and 10 to 11% of the total  emissions.

Chemical scrubbers
Various carbon dioxide scrubbing processes have been proposed to remove from the air, usually using a variant of the Kraft process. Carbon dioxide scrubbing variants exist based on potassium carbonate, which can be used to create liquid fuels, or on sodium hydroxide. These notably include artificial trees proposed by Klaus Lackner to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using chemical scrubbers.

Basalt storage
Carbon dioxide sequestration in basalt involves the injecting of into deep-sea formations. The first mixes with seawater and then reacts with the basalt, both of which are alkaline-rich elements. This reaction results in the release of and  ions forming stable carbonate minerals.

Underwater basalt offers a good alternative to other forms of oceanic carbon storage because it has a number of trapping measures to ensure added protection against leakage. These measures include “geothermal, sediment, gravitational and hydrate formation.” Because hydrate is denser than  in seawater, the risk of leakage is minimal. Injecting the at depths greater than 2700 m ensures that the  has a greater density than seawater, causing it to sink.

One possible injection site is Juan de Fuca plate. Researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found that this plate at the western coast of the United States has a possible storage capacity of 208 gigatons. This could cover the entire current U.S. carbon emissions for over 100 years.

This process is undergoing tests as part of the CarbFix project.

Acid neutralisation
Carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid when dissolved in water, so ocean acidification is a significant consequence of elevated carbon dioxide levels, and limits the rate at which it can be absorbed into the ocean (the solubility pump). A variety of different bases have been suggested that could neutralize the acid and thus increase absorption. For example, adding crushed limestone to oceans enhances the absorption of carbon dioxide. Another approach is to add sodium hydroxide to oceans which is produced by electrolysis of salt water or brine, while eliminating the waste hydrochloric acid by reaction with a volcanic silicate rock such as enstatite, effectively increasing the rate of natural weathering of these rocks to restore ocean pH.

Danger of leaks
Carbon dioxide may be stored deep underground. At depth, hydrostatic pressure acts to keep it in a liquid state. Reservoir design faults, rock fissures and tectonic processes may act to release the gas stored into the ocean or atmosphere.

Financial costs
Some argue that the cost of carbon sequestration would actually increase over time. The use of the technology would add an additional 1-5 cents of cost per kilowatt hour, according to estimate made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The financial costs of modern coal technology would nearly double if use of CCS technology were to be implemented.

Energy requirements
The energy requirements of sequestration processes may be significant. In one paper, sequestration consumed 25 percent of the plant's rated 600 megawatt output capacity.
 * After adding CO2 capture and compression, the capacity of the coal-fired power plant is reduced to 457 MW.

Microbes and drug discovery
Scientists have recently begun to explore the subterranean environments affiliated with carbon sequestration deep-well drilling operations for unique soil bacteria capable of producing new pharmaceutical leads. Soil microbes have long been a source for effective drugs and new research, such as that conducted at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation, suggests subterranean environments to be an untapped source for new discovery.