As we watch the ongoing disaster in Japan, first the earthquake, then the tsunami and the apparent nuclear meltdown at not one, but three reactors, we should take to heart the lesson Mother Nature is teaching us. It wasn’t long ago our nation was dealing with a horrific disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, when huge amounts of oil flowed for months from a blown off-shore drilling rig. Technology is wonderful but it can give us a false sense of security; a sense that we can control anything as long as we put our brightest minds towards the solution. Well, that’s not always the case.
I discussed the concerns of carbon sequestration last year in another blog post and on BlogDecatur. It’s not as though my concerns and those echoed by Matthew Jackson, who is a current city council candidate fell on deaf ears; our comments were heard, just quickly and rather flippantly dismissed by city leaders. Again, I call for a serious discussion on the matter.
Carbon sequestration is touted by the coal industry and other large CO2 producing factories, as the answer to clean coal and global warming. The practice of injecting liquefied carbon dioxide into the earth is not new. The oil industry has used it for the last three decades as a means to extract hard to reach fossil fuels but on a much smaller scale than what would be needed to store the CO2 produced by a clean coal power plant or in Decatur’s case, ADM. ADM is currently testing carbon sequestration, with federal money, near Richland Community College and if proved successful, could possibly store large amounts of CO2 right here, thousands of feet beneath the Decatur area. So what’s the problem with that?
Human error is always a concern but after watching the horrible aftermath of Japan’s recent earthquake, it should be stated that the possibility of a devastating earthquake in the Midwest is very real. It’s not a question of if but when. Geologists pretty much concur that the chance of of 8.0 or greater earthquake within the next 50 years is between 7-10%. An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0 or higher occurring within the next 50 years is 90%. (Source.) There are also other faults, such as the one that shook our area a few years ago, which too pose a risk. I remember that quake very well and even though it was minor, the ground sure did some serious shaking. Imagine an earthquake thousands of times more powerful than that one, which an 8.0, even hundreds of miles away would certainly be. I find it hard to believe that an earthquake of that scale would be no cause for alarm in the case of CO2 being stored in the ground below us. Do we really want to take the risk?
So what’s the big deal of large amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere if an earthquake or other disaster occurred? Well, If CO2 rapidly escaped it “could result in low-lying areas near the breach filling with CO2 and people becoming asphyxiated.” (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/sec005group04/negative_effects). And as a I stated in an earlier article, such a thing has happened before, though the result of a naturally occurring phenomena. In 1996, carbon dioxide which had been building up below Lake Nyos in Cameroon, suddenly exploded and 1,700 people lost their lives. They couldn’t breathe.
So what should we do?
Stop carbon sequestration experiments beneath Decatur or any populated area in Illinois and the nation for that matter. I would like to see public hearings take place and residents be informed of the dangers and unknowns of this “experiment”. After all, we are the guinea pigs.
I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this subject as I do more research.
