Do we need to capture and store CO2 from coal plants to meet emissions reduction targets?
May 19, 2010
I wrote a very brief article for EARTH magazine addressing this question for their ‘Voices’ series. It is posted here and will be in the print edition in a couple months.
Feel free to use this post for any comments and discussion about it — however, I am doing some traveling through the weekend so I may not be very responsive until next week.
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Clastic Detritus 
My old geochemistry prof used to say that one generation’s waste is anothers resource. That was when “heap leach recovery from old gold mine tailings was taking off. So, how do you make CO2 a resource item? While its great for enhanced oil recovery schemes, such as done at the Weyburn Field in Saskatchewan, Canada, that still isn’t using a whole lot of the stuff on an industrial scale.
One possible way of making this gas into a product is by converting the gas to a carbonate rich slurry that can be incorporated into making cement ( now being researched ). There is going to be huge demand for construction cement for quite some time to come; this developing process may be one way to convert a troublesome waste into a product.
Chris … that is a great point — what can we make out of CO2 sequestered in solid form. I never heard about the cement idea, pretty clever.