It should be possible to pump a major proportion of the world’s greenhouse gases underground, according to researchers at Adelaide university, Australia. Their findings are a byproduct of research being carried out on behalf of oil production companies, whose activities at oil and gas fields produce significant CO2 emissions. Adelaide’s national Centre for Petroleum Geology and Geophysics is investigating ways of removing those emissions by injecting the CO2 back into the ground, and this technology, for removing huge quantities of gas in CO2 ‘sinks’, seems to be leading the way. The aim is to find places where hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 could be injected at high rates for many years, and it appears that Australia has several sites where this could be feasible both technically and economically.
