05.07.2009
An international climate change initiative that focuses on sequestration technology development
The amount of carbon available in the atmosphere and the biosphere. Unlike carbon in fossil fuels, carbon stored in the biosphere can be released very easily into the atmosphere through forest fires, insect outbreaks, decay, logging, land use changes or even the decline of forest ecosystems as a result of climate change.
The amount of carbon by weight per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced
Carbon tax is viewed as an alternative to the cap-and-trade system. One of the reasons is that cap-and-trade system involving plant-by plant-measurements is difficult to administer and can provide incentives for evasion. Under a cap-and-trade system, the government would set an overall limit on emissions and allocate permits to emitters. If one plant reduces its emissions more quickly than another, it can sell its credits to the other emitter. A carbon tax would simply increase the cost of emitting each ton of carbon, which could then be passed on to consumers. A carbon tax offers certainty about the price of polluting, which appeals to many economists and businesses.
Oil recovery practices leave behind a large resource of “stranded oil”. Such stranded oil provides a substantial target for enhanced oil recovery technology. Emerging, advanced EOR technologies such as CO2 first tried in 1972 could double the incremental oil recovery. Until recently, most of the CO2 used for EOR has come from naturally-occurring reservoirs. But new technologies are being developed to produce CO2 from industrial applications such as natural gas processing, fertilizer, ethanol, and hydrogen plants in locations where naturally occurring reservoirs are not available
Carbon dioxide capture and geological storage
All parts (reservoirs) and fluxes of carbon; usually thought of as a series of the four main reservoirs of carbon interconnected by pathways of exchange. The four reservoirs, regions of the Earth in which carbon behaves in a systematic manner, are the atmosphere, terrestrial biosphere (usually includes fresh water systems), oceans and sediments (includes fossil fuels).
Carbon sequestration is the term given to a suite of technologies that can remove CO2 from large point sources, such as power plants, oil refineries and industrial processes, or from the air itself. The CO2 can then be stored in geologic formations such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep coal seams or saline reservoirs. It can also be stored in plants, trees and soils by increasing their natural CO2 uptake. Because carbon sequestration holds the potential both to reduce emissions of CO2 from point sources and to remove CO2 from the air, sequestration research has grown over the last five years from small-scale, largely conceptual studies, to one of the highest single technology priorities. >.