Hoping to square coal with a lower-carbon future, engineers on the Missouri Slope are pursuing projects to capture carbon dioxide and lock it deep beneath the plains.
The lignite country faces a hard question: how to keep burning coal in an age that increasingly counts the carbon. One answer taking shape on the Missouri Slope is carbon capture — trapping the carbon dioxide from a power plant or gasifier before it reaches the air, and pumping it deep underground into porous rock where it can be stored for the ages.
Putting the Carbon Back Underground
The geology of the plains, it turns out, is well suited to the task, with thick layers of suitable rock far below the surface. Some captured carbon can even be put to work, driving more oil out of aging fields in the process known as enhanced recovery, so that the same molecule serves twice.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Carbon capture traps power-plant carbon dioxide before it reaches the air.
- The plains' deep rock formations are well suited to carbon storage.
- Captured carbon can drive additional oil from aging fields.
The projects are costly and their future uncertain, bound up in policy and price as much as in engineering. But the almanac notes the ambition of the effort — to let the brown coal of the Slope keep the lights on while stowing its carbon back in the ground it came from.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
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