Fracking could foil carbon capture plans

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Cracking open solid rock in a bid to squeeze out natural gas could spoil future efforts to store the carbon dioxide we release from burning fossil fuels.

Gas companies are increasingly using hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" to reach natural gas trapped within impermeable shale rock. Fracking activities have been blamed for contaminating drinking water, causing small earthquakes and driving up greenhouse gas emissions.

But Michael Celia of Princeton University says the biggest threat may be to carbon storage.

Eventually, the CO₂ generated at power plants could be stored underground, in highly porous rocks that form deep saline aquifers. However, such aquifers remain useful for trapping gas only as long as there is a layer of impermeable caprock above them, to keep the CO₂ from seeping back to the surface.

That's where fracking might cause problems. Celia says 80 per cent of the US's potential CO₂ storage volume overlaps with shale gas fields. In time, the impermeable shale will be poked through with so many holes from fracking that it will no longer form an effective seal for any aquifer below.

"Somebody should have thought of this before," says Stuart Gilfillan of the University of Edinburgh, UK. "The key thing is to work out how much of a problem it is." It is unlikely that all the affected storage volume will be lost, because some aquifers are deeper than the gas fields and have their own shale caps.

The US has pushed ahead the most with fracking; other countries have so far left their potential storage sites untouched, Gilfillan says. There are also many offshore saline aquifers ? particularly in north-west Europe ? which no one wants to frack.

Journal reference: Environmental Science & Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es2040015

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