More media coverage of the CAP concept

Another Alaskan newspaper has picked up the story of the CO2 Antarctic pumpdown concept.  The Fairbanks Daily News Miner is my hometown newspaper.    


The News Miner is a venerable old newspaper that began publishing about a century ago when Fairbanks was a small mining town on the edge of the very big Alaskan wildnerness.  Today the newspaper, like many small town newspapers, covers mainly local news stories but still prints wire-services stories about major national and international events.  The story in the Daily News Miner was also written by Ned Rozell.  The story was published on October 25 with the title "a cool idea for locking up carbon dioxide" and other than the title the story in the Daily News Miner is very similar to the story in the Alaska Dispatch.

The Daily News Miner article states:  " the great plateau of East Antarctica, home of the South Pole. There sits an ice sheet as large as the Lower 48. At its thickest, the ice is 15,000 feet above the ocean. Upon that ice in 1983, Russians at the Vostok Research Station recorded a temperature of minus 128.6 Fahrenheit. Ice cores show no evidence of temperatures close to the thawing mark.
“There’s no melt in the record, which goes back 200,000 years,” Beget said. “It’s a natural place for this concept.”

The idea that CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the cryosphere is at the heart of the CO2 Antarctic pumpdown concept.    All geoengineering proposals tend to be incredibly expensive because dealing with the large volumes of CO2 necessary to produced a global scale change in atmospheric chemistry is a huge, huge problem.  By using a natural geologic reservoir to store the CO2, the CAP concept removes one of the major expenses.  There is no need to build storage tanks for CO2. No need to power up pumps and move the CO2 via pipelines.  No money need be spent on an infrastructure at all for storing the CO2.  

The article goes to say, "To get the carbon dioxide out of the air and down to the ice sheet, Beget proposes seeding the air over central Antarctica with monoethanolamine, a compound industry workers use to capture carbon dioxide before it exits smokestacks."

I think this is the more technically challenging part of the CAP model. There are quite a number of industrial compounds and even some common minerals that will bond with CO2. I begin by discussing monoethanolamine simply as a way to get the necessary research started. Normally in industrial CO2 removal, monoethanolamine or a similar compound is used to bond with CO2, and then release the CO2 after some kind of chemical treatment so the CO2 can be collected and stored. However, the CAP concept is simpler----the compound just needs to bond with CO2 and be stable when solid and frozen.