Slowing climate change by ‘putting carbon back where it came from’

A technology that can slow or stop climate change already exists — and has a history of bipartisan support in Washington. But it has a few hoops to jump through before it can make a bigger impact.

The method is called carbon capture, which removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground.

“You can think of this whole process as essentially putting carbon back where it came from,” said Ben Grove, senior manager for carbon storage with the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force.

“Geologic storage has been occurring since the 1970s, mostly in the oil and gas industry, but to date, we’ve stored over a billion tons of Co2 in deep geologic formations.”

There’s significant storage potential in the U.S. — but challenges in infrastructure and storage permits may stand in the way of progress.

“We’re thinking [carbon capture] needs to be scaled up to the gigaton scales,” Grove said. “But this could grow up to a very large industry — like billions of tons [of carbon capture].”

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