By John DeFore

Proposals to solve the planet’s CO2 woes through sequestering the problematic emissions — pumping them into some hole in the ground where they can’t affect the atmosphere — raise numerous concerns for skeptics. Won’t the stuff leak out, wasting the fortune we spent on sequestering, and leaving us worse off than we would have been by cutting CO2 production in the first place?

Researchers led by Columbia University geophysicist David Goldberg think they’re closer to resolving some of those concerns, with a proposal that would address the possibility of leakage on two fronts.

They suggest injecting the carbon into mammoth basalt formations located thousands of feet below the sea, far off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. There, they contend in a recently published paper, 1,000 feet of undersea sediment would block any leaks that might occur. In addition, as it interacted with water and minerals in the basalt, the carbon would transform into stable materials called carbonates. Then there’s all that water, which at the right depth can further inhibit CO2 escape.

Naysayers who are won over by the formation’s safety advantages — Goldberg described the site to Wired as “a dream reservoir” — will swoon over its size: The rock, located on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, is so big the scientists believe it could hold well over a hundred years’ worth of emissions at the U.S.’s current level of output.

Numerous problems remain, however, such as the cost of capturing the carbon, the difficulty of getting it out to the site and the fact that much of the formation lies in international waters.

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