Last month, I wrote about a magical carbon scrubber for power plants. Of course, once you capture all that CO2, you'll have to find a place to put it. The July issue of Popular Mechanics has aneato article on carbon sequestration. Most of the information I've looked up on this technology rattles off the methods of storage, but doesn't really go into the nerdy details. This one gives you the knowledge need to impress girls(!) amaze your friends(!) and all that.

The main methods for burying our carbon problem are to banish it to the ocean floor and store it in different kinds of rock strata - where it either binds with coal, turns into rock, or dissolves into saline.

Currently, the most promising methods help to enhance oil recovery. I wonder what the ratio is of carbon stored to carbon emitted by this method, since the oil's CO2 isn't likely to be recovered.

PM makes it sound likesequestration tech has a long road before it is truly feasible. However, the article also notes that researchers have identified saline formations in Pennsylvania that could store 300 years worth of the state's coal emissions and a formation of carbon-hungry peridotite that has the - and I stress this - potential to gobble up all of the excess CO2 currently in the atmosphere.

Some interesting and daunting facts from the PM story:

• A single 1000-megawatt coal-fired power plant can send 6 million tons of CO₂ up its stack annually—as much as two million cars.
• The amount of CO₂ produced by a 1000-megawatt power plant over its 60-year lifetime is staggering: the equivalent of 3 billion barrels of oil.
• One expert says that "The amount of oil we consume in one day might be similar to the amount of CO₂ we'll have to handle daily."
• More than 100 new coal-burning power plants are on utility company drawing boards in the United States.