Eugene weekly., June 16, 2011, Page 15, Image 15

He says Big Sky will know “relatively soon” if the
project is working “because as we collect the samples once
every couple weeks or so, the trend will develop pretty
soon.”
Small grains of the
basalt mounted in epoxy
that could be used for
carbon sequestration
CARBON, CARBON EVERYWHERE
Just as the earth has always released carbon, it has also
always stored it, without any hocus pocus. Humans are just
releasing a whole lot more of the stuff by burning fossils
fuels. Kearns says, “Coal is the culprit in global warming,”
which is why the Sierra Club has targeted coal power in
its “Beyond Coal” campaign. She calls carbon storage and
capture “a distraction from the true source of the problem.”
Coal provides about half of the U.S.’s electricity and
more than 30 percent of our global warming pollution,
according to the Sierra Club. In Oregon specifi cally, Kearns
says, despite our hydropower, wind and solar production,
coal provides about 40 percent of our power. Though
Oregon is set to stop burning coal at the Boardman plant by
2020, Portland General Electric has an ownership interest in
Montana’s Colstrip coal-fi red power plant, and Oregon gets
a large percentage of its 40 percent coal-produced power
from Montana and Wyoming. The more coal burned, the
more CO2 produced, and all that CO2 has to go somewhere.
The Columbia River basalt layer extends from Idaho
into Eastern Oregon and Washington, along the river’s path.
Big Sky says the CO2 storage potential of the Columbia
River Basalt Group “makes it one of the most signifi cant
potential deep geological storage formations in the region.”
Given Oregon’s dependence on CO2 producing coal-fi red
electricity, it’s all rather convenient.
OSU forestry professor Mark Harmon studies CO2 in
forests. “They will probably say they have a permanent
solution, and if it doesn’t leak back out then it’s true,” he
says of CO2 injection. “Nothing biological is permanent,
but that’s a little bit misleading.” Biological systems, he
says, like rangelands and forests, can be permanent if they
are maintained.
“You have to think of what your starting point is,”
Harmon says, “Nothing is really permanent, even planets
and the sun.”
In the case of forests, he draws the analogy of a bucket.
“We’ve got a bucket; we’ve got leaks in it. Some is leaking
out, but the more we pour in the bucket the more that
bucket will store.” In a forest managed for carbon storage,
one would harvest less often, he says, taking less each time
and raising the permanent amount of carbon in it.
No matter how you store it, too much CO2 is a problem.
CO2 is part of the greenhouse effect, which used to keep the
planet at a nice temperature for human survival, but humans
— and our love for fossil fuels — have dramatically increased
the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that has increased
the temperature of the earth. According to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global CO2 for
April 2011 was 391.92 parts per million. That’s up over 36
percent from pre-Industrial Revolution levels of 280 ppm, and
according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
it’s why the earth’s temperature is rising.
Plants store carbon and rangelands are covered in
plants, and Tony Svejcar researches the way rangelands
store CO2. Half or a little more of the earth’s surface is
covered in rangelands, he says.
Svejcar began researching rangeland carbon storage in
1993. He says the research lasted “for 10-plus years, but we
couldn’t get any interest at the Washington level.” He says
when it comes to rangeland, “there are lots of examples of
people who manage the resource well.” If ranchers could
get carbon credits for the carbon stored in their rangelands,
he says, it could be a marketing niche.
The additional benefi ts to well-managed rangelands are
worth even more, Svejcar says: Less erosion, better habitat
and more productivity. Forests yield similar benefi ts when
managed for carbon.
Svejcar says that the cost of monitoring how much
CO2 is being stored on something as variable as rangeland
is prohibitive, and a drought year can turn a carbon sink
into a source. Most rangelands, he says, “over time will
sequester carbon but there’s huge spatial variability, and
there’s variability over time.”
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
COURTESY PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY
According to Harmon, another reason the quick
carbon injection fi x, as opposed to terrestrial solutions, is
appealing is because some of the agricultural, range and
forestry solutions are “a little more complicated than trap it
and stick it into the ground,” and they give the false image
of impermanence. “That makes it harder to sell,” he says.
Because there was no interest in funding the rangeland
research Svejcar was working on, he says that he “moved
on to other pressing questions.” Now he says with the
increased focus on carbon sequestration, “They want us
to set up these programs, and we don’t have the research
behind it.”
Harmon says, “The problem is it doesn’t take a lot
of research to fi gure out some problems, like with these
carbon debts, but there’s no money to look at this.”
A NEW ENERGY FUTURE?
Big Sky bills itself as “a new energy future for Montana,
Wyoming, Idaho, South Dakota, the Pacifi c Northwest
and the nation.” The partnership says it encompasses
universities, national laboratories, private companies, state
agencies and tribes. Several OSU professors are part of the
project, though none associated with Big Sky responded to
requests for interviews.
That new energy future comes with some dangers.
According to the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA)
checklist that Batelle Memorial Institute’s Pacifi c
Northwest National Laboratory fi led in Washington as part
of the permit process, “the presences of large volumes of
compressed CO2 would present a signifi cant health and
environmental issue because of the asphyxiation hazard.”
But the SEPA checklist says since the mill site is a mile
from any residences and “no natural or injection related
activities appear feasible to cause a CO2 leakage event”
there is little danger to humans at the pilot site.
What happens after the pilot project is another story
if the tests are deemed successful, and the effort to store
carbon in basalt expands.
Cameron and Jane Kerr allege the Weyburn-Midale
CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project in Saskatchewan,
Canada, is leaking CO2 hundreds of times above safe levels
and killing rabbits, goats and other small animals.
Barry Robinson, a lawyer with Ecojustice in Canada,
has been advising the Kerrs on their case. The farm is near
an aging oil fi eld operated by Cenovus (which also has
a hand in oil extraction from the controversial Canadian
tar sands). The oil fi eld is part of the Weyburn carbon
sequestration project.
“It’s billed as a CO2 storage and recovery project,”
Robinson says. He says three years after Cenovus began
injecting CO2 to store the carbon and force oil to the
surface, the Kerrs “started seeing some unusual things
going on,” on their farm — the bubbling ponds and dead
animals.
Soil gas testing contracted by the Kerrs showed “very high
CO2 levels in the soil on a number of locations,” Robinson
says. A study by the Petroleum Technology Research Centre,
which manages the CO2 project, said “no results have been
found that would support the recently reported conclusion”
that CO2 from the project “has migrated through the
geological storage system to the surface.”
Robinson says, “From our point of view, there’s
something very unusual going on in the Kerrs’ land.” And it
started, he says, after CO2 injection began. The consultant
hired by the Kerrs wrote in his study that the “source of
the high concentrations of CO2 in the soils of the Kerr
property is clearly the anthropogenic CO2 injected into the
Weyburn reservoir.”
Robinson says well bores in the oil fi eld — there are
25 wells within a mile of the Kerrs’ farm — that were
improperly sealed could account for the leakage.
After the Kerrs released the fi ndings to a media outcry
in the U.S. and Canada, it was decided that more testing
would be done. Robinson says Cenovus began its testing
last week. Carbon capture and storage can be done, the
attorney says, “But it has to be done right.”
Big Sky had been working on a deal with SaskPower
in Saskatchewan to import CO2 from Canada and store it
in Montana, but the $270 million deal fell through in late
2010. More than a million tons of the gas would have been
sent through 50 miles of pipelines to the U.S. for storage.
Carbon capture and storage is “certainly is not going
solve our climate woes,” says Cesia Kearns.
There’s another kind of leakage that is an issue, forestry
professor Harmon says. “Without a system to limit the
emissions, you get a lot of leakage problems,” he says. He
points out that if one nation restricts fossil fuel emissions
and others don’t, manufacturing simply moves to the
country without an emissions cap. There needs to be an
overall system that pushes down emissions, he says, but “it
doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.”
Even when it comes to CO2, Harmon says, “Humans
love the techno fi x. If we can keep doing what we’re doing
and just fi x it through technology, then we do. If I can get
pill instead of changing my diet then just give me a pill and
I’ll just keep eating all those burgers and fries.”
ew
EUGENE WEEKLY JUNE 16, 2011
15