Rocks could be climate change key

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec 1, 2011 -- UPI

U.S. researchers say subjecting chunks of rock to extreme conditions in the laboratory could help in curbing climate change.

Scientists at Stanford University say recreating conditions of pressure and temperature found deep underground can yield critical data about the large-scale underground storage of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas and leading cause of global warming.

"About 60 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from power plants, refineries and other industries," Sally Benson, a Stanford professor of energy resources engineering, said.

"One way to significantly curb global warming is to capture carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and store the emissions in geologic formations thousands of feet below the surface."

Benson and her colleagues have studied rock under extreme conditions to predict the behavior of vast quantities of carbon dioxide pumped deep into the ground.

"We want to see where the carbon dioxide moves, how fast, how much gets dissolved and how much gets trapped," Benson said.

"Before, you could only estimate the average properties of a rock," she said. "Now we can tell you the precise carbon dioxide saturation and relate that to other rock properties in a quantitative way.

"Fundamentally, carbon capture and storage is not such a challenging thing to do. If we were really serious about dealing with climate change, we would be deploying this technology today."

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