Virginia Tech is serving as the technical lead of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded project that aims to store more than 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and reduce the risk and costs of future projects.
Recently announced by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and administered by the National Energy Technology Lab under federal award number DE-FE0032447, the Atlantic Coast CO2 Emissions Storage Sink, commonly referred to as Project ACCESS, is a CarbonSAFE Phase II feasibility study in South Florida that will evaluate the potential for safe and permanent geological carbon dioxide storage at depths exceeding 7,500 feet below the Earth’s surface.
The Virginia Tech Project ACCESS team includes Steve Holbrook, professor, Department of Geosciences; Nino Ripepi, associate professor, Department of Mining and Mineral Engineering; Rohit Pandey, assistant professor, Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering; Piyali Chanda, research associate, Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Resources; and Ryan Pollyea, Department of Geosciences.
Each year, the typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Based on those numbers, if Project ACCESS develops, it could eliminate the annual carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 370,000 passenger vehicles.
The technology is especially applicable to industries that have difficulty lowering greenhouse emissions, such as steel and cement production. By retrofitting production plants with carbon capture technology, the emissions could be contained and injected into deep geological formations, allowing those industries to greatly reduce their carbon footprint without sacrificing production.
The end result of this process would deposit and trap carbon dioxide in many of the same types of geological formations that hold other resources. Not only will Project ACCESS help industrial sectors with hard-to-reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it will do so by storing the emissions in the challenging types of rocks many previous efforts have avoided.
“With many industrial emitters and a limited history exploring carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage opportunities, Project ACCESS represents an initial step toward understanding the opportunities and challenges associated with commercial deployment in South Florida,” said Ben Wernette, principal scientist and strategic partnerships lead for Southern States Energy Board, which is overseeing the project. “Virginia Tech is responsible for the design and oversight of the surface characterization program, including all field data acquisition programs and modeling efforts.”
“We’re working to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and doing it in a way that’s economically, technically, and scientifically sound,” Pollyea said. “Our research aims to put carbon dioxide permanently underground, while also developing long-term plans to monitor and verify that the carbon dioxide is stored securely.”
“If we can get this to work, we can unlock a lot of real estate for carbon storage and take a critical step towards Virginia Tech becoming a destination for the kind of interdisciplinary research, innovation, and talent development needed to advance the control of carbon emissions,” Pollyea said.
Source: Virginia Tech
