As governments around the world scramble to make headway in the race against climate change, researchers at Simon Fraser University are exploring a new carbon capture and storage possibility for the Lower Mainland.
Earth sciences professor Shahin Dashtgard believes the climate-polluting greenhouse gas could be stored beneath the streets of Metro Vancouver, dissolved in salt water and kept in a salty substance up to 2,000 metres below the surface.
The high pressure at those depths would keep the carbon dioxide in its dissolved state in the brine solution, which is denser than the brine in the rock, and would sink.
The tactic wouldn’t work in Alberta or northeastern B.C., Dashtgard explained, because the subsurface is full of fine-grained, impermeable rock formations.
“We do, in fact, have porous and permeable rock (here) that we can inject CO2 into,” he said.
“But unlike other places, we’re going to have to look at a different form of injection, kind of a made-in-B.C. solution that allows us to store that securely in the subsurface in a way that’s actually safe for society.”
Injected into the ground, he added, the earth would function almost like a pop can — a pressurized container that would trap the carbon dioxide for a millennia.
Dashtgard and his team are working with the Metro Vancouver Regional District, with funds from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, to assess the potential impact of seismic activity on possible storage sites.
If the underground injection carbon capture and storage project were to go ahead, he explained, it would need to be away from major fault lines.
“That’s what we’re trying to build, is that understanding of the subsurface to be able to say, ‘Hey, look we can do this safely if we were to inject in this location at this depth,'” Dashtgard said.
“It’s not a technology that’s unproven, it’s just we’re doing this in a region that’s really not well understood.”
The researchers are using geophysical, geological and reservoir engineering data from previous explorations of Metro Vancouver to map the region, and eventually, create a detailed geological model of one or two candidate sites for the carbon storage method.
Last year, the Metro Vancouver Regional District produced more than 28,000 tonnes in energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. The entire region, however, emits some 15 million tonnes — 2.5 million of which can be attributed directly to industrial facilities, according to SFU.
Dashtgard’s comments come on the final day of the COP28 climate change conference in Dubai, where world leaders have gathered to pave an effective path forward in the global fight against climate change — in particular, limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas emitting by human activities.
“Looking at other ways to actually utilize CO2 is quite important, but those technologies are not here yet. Those technologies may not be economically viable for decades,” Dashtgard said.
“What we’re assessing is, are there other ways to get rid of CO2 over the medium-term … while we actually develop these new technologies and implement them not only on a Canadian level, but also on a global level, because that’s really what we need is, we need to actually allow other countries to be able to implement similar technologies.”
The university has said the model it develops will be used by project collaborators at the University of Calgary to simulate the short- and long-term behaviour of stored carbon dioxide, and assess the risks and storage capacity of carbon storage at those sites.
— with files from Cassidy Mosconi
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