Reuters As futuristic projects designed to capture carbon from coal-burning industries and store it underground have failed, the two largest consumers of the fuel, the United States and China, hope answers to limiting emissions blamed for global warming lie in the past. Power-generators, coal miners and policy makers had put faith in projects to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants and pump it directly underground into geologic formations for permanent storage. The great hope was that the technology would prevent much of the world's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from reaching the atmosphere. But so-called carbon capture and storage projects have collapsed like a row of dominoes this year in West Virginia, Scotland and Germany. The stumbling blocks have been high costs for the technology and bleak prospects the world will put a high price on emitting greenhouse gases. Fortunately for those seeking to cut emissions from coal, one industry has profited for nearly four decades from socking away carbon dioxide emissions. That industry, enhanced oil recovery, is hungry for more of the gas. Some companies have piped carbon dioxide from naturally occurring sources into aging oil fields to push out crude that traditional drilling is unable to reach. As natural sources of carbon dioxide run dry, many of these companies are looking to industrial sources of the gas. Power utilities and other coal-burning companies may find it wiser to link up with this mature industry than to plunge ahead with their own versions of carbon capture and storage. Originally, enhanced oil recovery specialists thought aging oil fields could store about 100 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about five percent of what would be needed to reduce the threat of climate change. But as researchers learn more about the storage potential of old oil zones, in both China and the United States, they say much more carbon could potentially be stored in these places. Experts say success with enhanced oil recovery could give new life to the entire field of carbon capture by enlarging the market for man-made carbon, helping to build out a pipeline network to move it to market, and helping the business become more efficient in shooting the gas underground. If the world does not widely deploy carbon capture and storage by the 2020s, the cost of limiting global temperatures would rise by $1.1 trillion, the International Energy Agency said last month in its annual outlook. This would put an “extraordinary burden” on other low-carbon technologies including wind and solar power, the IEA said. __
