Carbon storage to be studied

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BUTTE - Carbon sequestration may be the wave of the future in energy development, and professors at Montana Tech will be part of researching how best to do it.

With concerns about global warming rising, the concept of injecting carbon dioxide - a byproduct of cars and industry - back into the ground to keep it out of the atmosphere is getting a lot of attention these days.

“It’s not too far in the future,” Martha Apple, associate professor of biology at Montana Tech, said of carbon re-injection. “That’s been used by the petroleum industry for a while.”

But gaining a better understanding of how the technique will affect the environment is needed before the technology can improve.
To that end, Apple and two others at Montana Tech are part of collaboration with Montana State University and the University of Montana to conduct research on carbon sequestration.

The Department of Energy recently awarded $1.4 million for the research to MSU, which is leading the project. The main site for the research is MSU in Bozeman.

But Montana Tech professors will have their hand in the research.

For Mary North-Abbott, professor of petroleum engineering, the focus will be on determining how injecting carbon dioxide into the ground affects the rocks there. She’ll be taking core samples of rock and injecting it with liquefied carbon dioxide.

“We’re actually going to build an apparatus where we can actually test cores,” she said. “We’re looking at them to see what the physical attributes are, the pore space and the grain size.”

Carbon dioxide is already used by the petroleum industry to aid in the recovery of oil. It gets injected in the ground to help make it easier to recover oil, North-Abbott said.

“It makes it flow better and easier to recover,” she said.

In Wyoming, for example, a pipeline was recently constructed to get carbon dioxide to some of the oil fields.

But carbon dioxide is also thought to be one of the leading contributors to global climate change. Gov. Brian Schweitzer has spoken often about the need to develop carbon sequestration technology.

Most of the current research on sequestration focuses on the methods to inject it into the ground, said Xiaobing Zhou, Tech assistant professor of geophysics. But he and Apple are looking at how leaks in areas where carbon dioxide is injected affects plants.

Apple last year collected sample of grasses, alfalfa and other plants at the site. They put tubes coming up from the ground to simulate a natural leak.

She said although it’s early in the study, the tests have shown that there could be some effect.

“Grasses around here have a seasonal die-back that they go through in late summer, and it may make that happen earlier,” she said.

North-Abbott received $219,500 for her research that will go on for three years. Apple and Zhou received $146,000