Last week, China and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in China, according to SciDevNet. CCS involves taking carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and storing it in deep geological formations, like empty reservoirs and saline aquifers.
The Near Zero Emission Coal Project (NZEC) will take place in either the Daqing and Jilin oilfields and saline aquifers of the Songliao Basisn or the oilfields of the Jiangsu Depression in the Subei Basin, and is scheduled to be completed by 2015. Representatives of the two parties agreed on the specific at the 12th EU–China summit in Nanjing, and the European Commission pledged up to $86 million to the project.
China's interest in undertaking serious CCS efforts is a response to encouragement from US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and to two reports published this autumn that point out China's ability to store massive amounts of carbon dioxide — 3,000 gigatonnes — in saline aquifers, which is ten times as much as was previously thought. Additionally, over 80 percent of China's carbon dioxide is emitted within 50 miles of a possible storage area.
No comments:
Post a Comment