The climate conference in Paris showed us there is massive momentum these days to reduce carbon emissions. That’s great. But there’s less talk about another, more controversial solution: removing carbon from the air, by storing it, and using it to generate other ingredients. The world’s largest corn processor Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) has already partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy to bury some of the CO2 they generate from ethanol production, deep underground. And they don’t just store it, there’s an important twist to it. They use a technology called Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage to combine the storage with energy from biomass, which could actually lead to producing negative carbon dioxide emissions (read more about how that works here.) Critics warn that storing the CO2 underground might not be so safe as we think. But this article in Scientific American shows that we need to study the possibility of carbon storage carefully, because it might be necessary to deal with greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels that are already in the atmosphere.
Why we shouldn’t forget about carbon capture and storage
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