Green light for greenhouse gas burial at sea

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17069713/

OSLO, Norway - International rules allowing burial of greenhouse gases beneath the seabed entered into force on Saturday in what will be a step toward fighting global warming — if storage costs are cut and leaks can be averted.

The new rules will permit industrialists to capture heat-trapping gases from big emitters such as coal-fired power plants or steel mills and entomb them offshore -- slowing warming while allowing continued use of fossil fuels.

"Storage of carbon dioxide under the seabed will be allowed from Feb. 10, 2007 under amendments to an international agreement governing the dumping of wastes at sea," the U.N.'s International Maritime Organization said in a statement.

The new rules, agreed upon in November, amend the U.N.'s London Convention on dumping at sea. Its text had been unclear about whether carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels, counted as a pollutant.

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seems like a problem to me. I mean, you stuff all this CO2 into some supposedly stable chamber, but does it stay stable when you acidify it? And are we going to do this with 80 billion tons of CO2 each year? It just doesn't add up to me.

... that people complain about the nuclear industry "storing problems
for future generations"?

:shrug:

the 3rd generation will hate us for the gas we put in the sea.

I will never forget this story I read a few years back. All these fish suddenly died in this small lake. No one could figure it out, until a biologist did a study and found that the CO2 at the bottom of the lake, one day, flipped with the oxygen rich upper water.

The fish "suffocated".

I get this queasy feeling that sometime down the road, this same thing will happen again on a much larger scale.