When Tsunami struck India/Asia in the year 2004 I wrote that the reasons for the earth quakes beneath the sea must be due to the reckless drilling and extraction of coal,gas and crude. Through the above given illustration it is easily intelligible that continuous mass exploitation of these buried treasures for centuries would definitely cause impact on the tectonic plates of the earth which may move resultant. I'm glad that Canada has decided to pump CO2 into a depleted oil field. What would be the environment impact of this may be a prudent question. But for the present it is really a convenient option. Why, after a thousand years the stored carbon gas may take a new incarnation!
A 210-foot-tall carbon dioxide absorber is moved to Southern Company's Kemper, Mississippi, power plant site.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MISSISSIPPI POWER
In Juliette, Georgia, Southern Company operates a coal-fired power plant that is the single largest source of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
In Kemper County, Mississippi, the same company is pioneering a technology that many experts believe will be crucial to preventing a climate disaster: It's building the world's first new power plant designed to capture and store most of its carbon.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, has been hailed for decades by some as an essential solution to the climate problem, and pilloried by others as unworkable and a dangerous distraction. This year, at last, it will be tested at full commercial scale. (See related, "Can Coal Ever Be Clean?" and photo gallery, "The Visible Impacts.")
The test ground won't be only a new power plant in Mississippi. It also will be about 1,600 miles north of here, in Saskatchewan, Canada, where a public utility is attempting to show that an old coal-fired power plant can be cleaned up. Sask Power has almost finished retrofitting one 110-megawatt unit of its Boundary Dam Power Station to capture 90 percent of the CO2 before it flies out the smokestack. In Saskatchewan as in Mississippi, the CO2 will be pumped underground into a partially depleted oil field and—after it has helped squeeze valuable oil to the surface—stored there indefinitely.
The battle to forestall climate change, President Barack Obama said in a speech last summer, requires us "to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants." But because coal is one of the cheapest ways to fuel electricity, with abundant stores all around the world, global carbon pollution is growing. Over the next two decades, when science says aggressive steps must be taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions, several hundred million people in the world will be getting electricity for the first time—and a lot of it will be fueled by coal. Many believe the world won't be able to stop drastic climate change without a technology for curbing emissions from the cheapest, most-carbon intensive fuel.
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