By Ad Crable, Bay Journal
Pennsylvania is ideally suited to help the nation fight global warming by becoming a leader in the effort to capture and store emissions of carbon dioxide, state officials say.
Their quest has just received a jolt of legitimacy from President Joe Biden’s massive climate plan, which calls on a greater national effort to capture, store and re-use carbon dioxide.
In the battle to slow global warming, carbon dioxide is the chief target. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that CO2 accounts for the vast majority of heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted by the U.S. from 1990–2019. Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have risen approximately 47% since 1750, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
Strategies for capturing carbon from fossil fuel power plants, to prevent it from entering the atmosphere, have long lingered on the sidelines. But the concept has remained a source of hope for an increasingly marginalized coal industry struggling to sustain production.
To make the mass collection of CO2 economically feasible, the U.S. would need to develop a vast network of pipelines to transport the gas, mainly in liquid form. It would also need industrial hubs where CO2 could be stored underground or diverted to other uses.
Pennsylvania wants to be one of those hubs. Advocates say the state is well-positioned for carbon storage, touting its deep-underground, porous rock reservoirs as places to safely store large amounts of carbon. Those reservoirs are 2 or more miles underground in the state’s western and northern reaches.
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