Clean Power Plan

The U.S. government is planning to crack down on power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions, and, as a result, a lot of money is about to pour into technology that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and lock it away. That raises an important question: Once carbon dioxide is captured and stored, how do we ensure it stays put? Power plants that burn fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, release a lot of carbon dioxide. As that CO₂ accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps heat near the Earth’s surface, driving global warming. But if CO₂ emissions can be captured instead and locked away for thousands of years, existing fossil fuel power plants could meet the proposed new federal standards and reduce their impact on climate change. We work on carbon capture and storage technologies and policies as a scientist and an engineer. One of us, Klaus Lackner, proposed a tenet more than two decades ago that is echoed in the proposed standards: For all car...