Throughout the election season of 2008, one of the few things both sides of the aisle could agree on was the importance of clean coal in balancing our need for energy with the desire to address climate change.  While the coal industry's definition of "clean" seems to be anything that doesn't create massive plumes of soot during combustion, I think it's fairly safe to say that in the public consciousness, and in the mind of many politicians, clean coal means sequestering emissions; that is, coal power that won't result in serious net carbon emissions.

 

And while many significant problems still exist surrounding the technology for capturing and storing CO2, new advances and existing research programs bring the sought-after technology closer to reality each day.

At first blush, the idea of carbon sequestration seems childishly absurd. It shouldn't be possible to simply pump carbon dioxide back underground to prevent it from reaching the atmosphere, and yet tests are revealing the practice is strikingly effective. From its origins a method of temporarily rejuvenating depleted oil fields, the technology has undergone significant advances, including efforts that have now identified rocks that can successfully sequester tons of carbon dioxide, and that have determined that extremely hot sequestered CO2 can in some cases seal itself into the Earth's crust.

Indeed, the major challenges posed by carbon sequestration now are not technical but economic. While coal plants have already been put into operation using some of the newest technologies, the price tag is extremely high, and there remains some question as to whether even the most sustainability-aware public would be willing—or even able—to foot the bill. Echoing this sentiment, researchers at MIT have suggested that sequestering the majority but not all CO2 emissions is the most financially viable answer.

Indeed, the International Energy Agency has said that governments world wide need to pony up some $20 billion dollars in funding immediately, if carbon sequestering technology is going to play a significant role in meeting the G8's carbon reduction guidelines.

While awards, grants, and other money sources aren't exactly hard to come by for carbon capture and storage research and development projects, other means of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere are gaining traction. While consensus seems to be the once popular idea of ocean sequestration will inevitably create an environmental disaster of similar scale to global warming by acidifying the world's oceans, some aquatic solutions have sprung up. Preliminary studies indicate that Salps, a plankton eating jellyfish in the southern oceans, may help sequester carbon naturally, by absorbing atmospheric carbon and transferring it to the ocean floor through its feces and carcasses.

Still, with an ever-growing global demand for power and abundant coal stocks, it is clear that carbon sequestration will be a major player as humanity struggles to overcome the climate change problem. While other technologies are constantly emerging that offer improved sustainability over capturing CO2 -- , especially when the environmental damage caused by mining coal is taken into consideration -- grants, subsidies and other economic considerations that reduce the cost of recapturing carbon may have the greatest net effect on halting climate change.

 

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