Japan to “bury” CO2 gas under the seabed

Japan's Environment Ministry said on September 5 that from spring 2014, it will conduct specific site selections in the subsea strata area to implement a plan to "bury" large amounts of CO2 emissions recovered from power plants.

This is seen as a way to deal with the increasing amount of CO2 that Japan has had to use thermal power plants since the earthquake and tsunami disaster in March 2011, which forced all of Japan's nuclear power plants to temporarily stop operating.

Illustration photo. (Source: greenmsps.org).

The increasing amount of CO2 has led Japanese experts to determine that collecting and burying this gas underground will be an effective solution in line with the government's greenhouse effect response policy. It is expected that the implementation of the CO2 burying project will be carried out until 2030.

The survey will focus on three areas located 200 meters below the ocean floor, allowing millions of tons of CO2 to be buried each year, according to a report by Japan's Ministry of the Environment.

The seabed areas of Japan are currently considered to be usable for a variety of purposes, so the prospect of implementing a CO2 storage plan is very feasible. However, confirming which strata to store them in requires a comprehensive and multi-year study.

The report also said that the process of burying CO2 in geological areas under the ocean floor requires the transportation of this type of waste gas from thermal power plants to be extremely careful. Therefore, building a transport pipeline tens of kilometers long to bays and coasts may not be suitable, instead experts are studying the transport and storage system using transport ships.

It is expected that the testing of the transport ship serving this process will be conducted in 2016, in which experts will apply the technology of packaging CO2 gas from ships and from offshore drilling rigs, then bringing it to the seabed.

Japan's Ministry of the Environment said the budget for investigation, exploration and technology testing in fiscal year 2014 will be around 1.2 billion yen.

The Japan Environmental Industrial Technology Research Agency said the potential for burying CO2 in the seas near Japan is about 150 billion tons. The amount of greenhouse gas emitted by Japan in 2011 was 1.3 billion tons, equivalent to the amount Japan emitted over the past 120 years.

The agency also said that the world's ability to store CO2 under the seabed is about 10 trillion tons, and competition between rivals from the US and Europe in researching and burying this type of emissions will become increasingly fierce.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Science and Industry also said that testing underground CO2 storage in Japan will begin in 2016, with a capacity of about 200 tons/year.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Ministry of the Environment said that through this test, technology and engineering applications will be added to serve the research process of the impact on surrounding seas and the possibility of CO2 gas leakage will be conducted.

After the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, Japan had to close its nuclear power plants, which do not emit CO2. In 2012, 90% of Japan's electricity was produced by thermal power plants, leading to a rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants has been carried out, but the use of thermal power plants remains unchanged, so dealing with CO2 is an urgent task for the Tokyo government.

If the underground CO2 burying is implemented, Japan will have a huge opportunity to export highly efficient thermal power plants abroad./.

According to (Vietnam+) - VT