1.1 Research a possible climate mitigation strategy/technology and blog about it (include a description of the strategy/technology, could it contribute to a full wedge?, what is the evidence/feasibility for this strategy/technology working?). (3 points)
Climate change mitigation strategies, which involve taking actions to reduce future effects of global warming, are many. One such strategy is the long term geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) (Hepple et al., 2002). This strategy involves storing the gas in geological “sequesters. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels (2002). Important climate change mitigation strategy will depend on varying factors: availability, capacity and location of suitable sites, the cost of geologic storage compared to other climate change mitigation options, and public acceptance. In order to calculate the feasibility of this strategy, calculations were used to look at the seepage rate, which would determine how much CO2 would seep back into the atmosphere annually based on a predetermined amount of sequestered CO2 (2002). Overall results from the study conducted by Hepple et al. concluded that the quantities of CO2 that must be sequestered are in the range of the estimated global geological sequestration capacity and that seepage rates would be less than 0.01% each year. Main drawbacks include financial cost of sequestering the CO2, as well as energy requirements for the process, both of which can be high. (2002)
Sources Used:
Hepple P.R., Benson M.S., 2002. Implications of Surface Seepage on the effectiveness of geological storage of Carbon Dioxide. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.