The Obama administration promised to work towards producing renewable and environmentally friendly energy, and the Department of Energy has been a big beneficiary, taking home a significant chunk of the stimulus money. Over the last few months, attention has been focused on getting the money flowing into projects designed to update and improve the electric grid. Friday, in a speech to the National Coal Council, Steven Chu, head of the Department of Energy, announced that the stimulus package will also fund major work towards carbon capture and storage, which could allow us to avoid many of the consequences of continued burning of fossil fuels. The planned spending, which includes $800 million specifically for cleaning pollutants out of coal plant exhaust will total $2.4 billion, which should provide the nascent field a significant boost.

To an extent, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a response to the fact that burning fossil fuels is likely to remain an economically favorable approach for far longer than we'd like it to be. Coal is currently the cheapest fossil fuel, and the one with the largest described reserves; unfortunately, it's also the dirtiest, both in terms of traditional pollutants and in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. CCS promises to allow us to continue to use this and other fossil fuels without the activities contributing to further climate change or ocean acidification. But the technology is hardly specific to coal; other industrial processes, such as chemical manufacturing and cement production, release significant amounts of CO 2 as well. It may even be possible to use this technology to draw CO 2 directly from the atmosphere.

In some contexts, the capture portion of things is already in use. In many areas, captured carbon dioxide is injected into natural gas fields in order to increase their productivity. Unfortunately, we don't fully understand whether these geologic formations will be sufficient to contain the carbon on the time scales that would be required.

The past administration had helped foster a few pilot CCS projects, but its plans to build a large-scale demonstration project were shelved indefinitely. So, to an extent, the programs announced by Chu represent the nation's first real attempt at getting CCS technology off the ground.

As mentioned earlier, a third of the total stimulus spending promised by the DOE will go towards a general clean coal effort. These should help limit the sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions that accompany the burning of coal, and determine how best to integrate these pollution controls with a CCS system. The intent is to get both the government and private companies experience with commercial-scale systems, and to explore the range of geological features that can be used successfully.

The lion's share of the money, just over $1.5 billion, will go to CCS technologies that are flexible enough to work in any industrial setting, regardless of where the carbon's coming from. According to the DOE, "the industrial sources include, but are not limited to, cement plants, chemical plants, refineries, steel and aluminum plants, manufacturing facilities, and petroleum coke-fired and other power plants." The DOE is similarly agnostic when it comes to what happens to the carbon afterwards, provided it doesn't wind up in the atmosphere. Mineralization approaches (which often involve injection into geological formations) are mentioned, as are two specific technologies: feeding the exhaust into an algal biofuel production facility, and compressing it for transport and storage using the earth-bound equivalent of a ramjet.

For me, however, the key steps in making CCS viable are getting small but necessary outlays. $50 million will go towards identifying geological formations that should provide the sort of long-term, stable storage that we need, while another $20 million will go to training a generation of people with the expertise to make this work. The DOE is looking to develop programs for both scientists and engineers, providing them with skills in geology, geophysics, geomechanics, geochemistry, and reservoir engineering, all of which will be necessary.

The DOE will shortly be posting a notice of intent describing how it intends to distribute the funding and evaluate the applications for these projects. After giving the public and industry a chance to provide feedback, money should start flowing late this year or early next. After years of false starts, this could be a very significant change.