Carnegie Mellon team makes sequestration recom...( PITTSBURGHCarbon capture and seques...)

PITTSBURGHCarbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, which captures carbon dioxide from power plants and safely disposes of it deep underground, will not meet its full potential in the United States without new federal regulations that create a uniform regulatory environment.

This is the conclusion of a set of four policy briefs just released by the CSSReg project led by M. Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

"At the moment, there is a patchwork of different rules across the U.S. and a great deal of legal uncertainty," Morgan said. "We need a clear way for CCS projects to obtain the right to inject carbon dioxide into appropriate geological formations and a strategy for safely addressing long-term stewardship once an injection project ends."

Morgan and his colleagues believe that without a safe and cost-effective way to use CCS, as part of a broader strategy for CO2 emissions control, there is no way the country will be able to achieve the reductions in future CO2 emissions that Congress and the Obama administration are now proposing.

The policy briefs, available from http://www.CCSReg.org, describe changes to federal law and agency rules needed to overcome regulatory and legal barriers to large-scale deployment of carbon sequestration.

The CCSReg project is supported by a $1.85-million grant from the New York-based Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) with additional support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In addition to investigators at Carnegie Mellon, the project team involves experts at the University of Minnesota, the Vermont Law School and the Washington, D.C.- based law firm of Van Ness Feldman.

While Morgan and his colleagues argue that a general framework for "performance-based regulation" should be established today, they believe the U.S. must build and gain experience with several commercial-scale facilities before finalizing many
'/>"/>