Given Labor's support for spending resources and time on carbon capture (especially advocated by the federal Member for Charlton and Minister for Climate Change, Greg Combet), this article on the work of Stanford geophysicist Mark Zobak provides even more evidence that pursuing this expensive and uncertain technology, simply to prolong the use of coal, is bad policy.
The article warns of problems for carbon capture in earthquake zones, and has clear implications for areas such as Newcastle and the Hunter.
Here is the introduction to the article:
Combating global warming by pumping carbon dioxide into the ground for long-term storage – known as carbon sequestration – could trigger small earthquakes that might breach the storage system, allowing the gas back into the atmosphere, according to Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback. That hazard, combined with a need for thousands of injection sites around the globe, may keep sequestration from being as feasible on a large scale as some have hoped.
Read the full article at: http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/18/earthquake-underground-storage-of-carbon-dioxide-co2-sequestration-ccs/
