By Dr. Robert Thorson

Super-sized meals can lead to gas and indigestion. The same is true with our super-sized diet of fossil fuels. Waste gas (CO2) and political indigestion are the result.

Deep beneath the Canadian prairie, in the little town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, a team of scientists is trying to do something about the world’s most politically embarrassing gas: carbon dioxide. There, nearly a mile below this big-sky country, is a large-scale experiment well worth watching. Scientists are trying to discover if some of our excess greenhouse gas can be hidden underground. Otherwise, it would accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming. Preliminary results of this experiment to pump CO2 into oil wells are quite encouraging.

Saskatchewan is a prairie buffer zone between the majestic mountains of Alberta to the west and forested Manitoba, which boasts some of the largest wilderness lakes in the world, to the east. Most U.S. newspapers don’t print much news from this particular part of the world, so you might not realize there’s a whole lot happenin’ near Weyburn these days besides buffalo roaming and wheat fields growing. Geoscientists are there, too, hanging out with cowboys and oil-field roughnecks. They have installed sensitive seismometers to listen for the underground snap, crackle and pop of the rocks as they adjust to the changing gas pressure. They analyze water samples for chemical changes. They use analytical techniques similar to those used in hospitals to make three-dimensional images of a growing gas bubble trapped between injection wells.

All of this is taking place in a rather small, ho-hum oil field, at least by the standards of those in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Discovered in 1954, the oil field was once an underground bubble of oil. It is now being replaced by an underground bubble of CO2 being piped in as waste gas from a synthetic fuels plant in North Dakota to the south. The gas will accumulate where the oil used to be: in porous layers of rock with plenty of empty pore space and fractures. This porous rock was once an old coral reef similar to those near Florida today. Above the porous rock lies more than a thousand feet of horizontal rock layers that are dense enough and muddy enough to prevent the underground fluids from escaping upward.

For the first 10 years, the oil was pumped out of this oil reservoir. Beginning in 1964, oil field engineers injected water into it to help push oil out of tighter spaces in the rock. By the year 2000, engineers were injecting CO2 into the reservoir to force out even more oil. It also gave scientists a chance to begin their carbon storage experiment. The basic plan is to pump 20 million tons of waste CO2 into the reservoir each year and then monitor what happens. Scientists expect that most of the excess gas will remain trapped as an underground bubble; that some will be permanently absorbed by chemical reactions; and that little if any will leak back to the atmosphere.

I think carbon sequestration projects such as this are a great idea. If it works in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, then other suitable waste dumps for gas will be identified and explored. My concern, however, is that the total mass of CO2 that we might sequester underground will be little more than a drop in the bucket of the roughly 6 billion tons of CO2 we dump into the atmosphere each year, equivalent to a single burp (or worse) in a lifetime of passing exhaust gas.

I have great faith in human ingenuity and technology to help us manage the excess gas associated with our super-sized energy meals. But it would be a whole lot simpler, and much more of a sure thing, if we all just went on an energy diet or ate smaller portions. Perhaps the rising price of oil will drive us to do what we should have done long ago to reduce CO2 emissions: Stop commuting alone in gas-guzzlers, insulate our homes and paddle a kayak rather than buzz around on jet skis. You can’t count on energy scientists to solve all our energy problems any more than you can count on medical specialists to keep us all healthy. Each of us, whether as individuals or as members of businesses, institutions or governments, must slim down and shape up with respect to energy conservation.

Until then, let’s pray that Earth doesn’t develop heartburn beneath the Canadian prairie.