Environmental Impact:

Carbon Capture and Storage

The Foundation will serve as common ground for Texas researchers, industry and government seeking to make Texas the leader in the capture and storage of carbon dioxide.

Each year about 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted from man-made sources worldwide and Texas accounts for about 1 billion tons of that total.

The challenge is to capture and store that CO2 and then measure, monitor and verify that it stays it place. Technologies exist to accomplish that goal but they have not been deployed on a commercial scale because of the cost for the new infrastructure and technology that is required.

One of the leading technologies is geologic sequestration where CO2 is injected deep into the earth in small pore spaces filled with saltwater.
The University of Texas, through its Bureau of Economic Geology, is conducting the largest CO2 sequestration project in the United States using brine injection. The partnership with the Southern States Energy Board is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 have been injected in the ongoing experiment.

The Bureau has independently identified geologic formations capable of sequestering 200 billion tons of CO2.

As a finalist for the FutureGen project, which would have stored 1 million tons of CO2 annually, Texas gained valuable technical, legal and regulatory experience regarding CO2 sequestration.

Given its practical experience and location, Texas is positioned from a governmental, industrial and geologic standpoint to be the world leader in CO2 sequestration.