Environment

Underground energy concerns

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To produce cleaner energy, companies and governments are looking underground. That’s got project neighbors worried. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Germany. (Photo of German carbon capture facility: Gerry Hadden)

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  Climate negotiators hunkered-down today for the fourth day of their two week summit Copenhagen.  They’re trying to find the right mix of financial incentives, political commitments, and investments in new technologies to patch-together a new global treaty to fight global warning.  For many governments and energy companies, some of the most promising new technologies are those used underground.  One technology taps geothermal heat for electricity; another is used to capture greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and store that pollution underground.  Both concepts face significant hurdles, including a public that’s sometimes wary of what’s going on “beneath its feet.”  The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Landau in der Pfalz, Germany.

GERRY HADDEN:  At the bakery in downtown Landau, Frau Schumacher is not used to watching her chocolate covered pastries suddenly tremble and flop to the floor.  So when that happened one morning last August, she thought the world was ending.  (Audio clip of Frau Schumacher, speaking in German.)  She says, “I didn’t know what was happening.  I live upstairs on the third floor, and I thought the building was going to come down.”  What happened was an earthquake.  It was minor.  It had jolted sleepy little Landau for a couple of seconds, and it got residents like Schumacher pointing fingers at a nearby geothermal electricity plant.  Engineers there have been drilling deep holes into the earth to tap super-hot water for energy.  (Audio clip of Audio Clip of Schumacher speaking in German.)  “We see the plant as negative,” Schumacher says.  “We are afraid that it will cause our houses to fall down.”  Investigators still aren’t sure whether the Landau facility’s deep drill holes provoked the quake.  On a tour of the plant, engineer Jerg Baumgaertner concedes they might have.  Other geothermal plants have triggered similar events, but Baumbaertner says people shouldn’t be alarmed by what he calls minor seismic movement.

JERG BAUMGAERTNER:  If we call every noise from the underground an earthquake, then I think we have a real communication problem, because it’s not what it is.  This is known since 200 years, that the rock reacts to the volume which is extracted from the underground.  The same is true for oil the gas; but nevertheless, there are towns on top and cities on top, and they all still alive.

HADDEN:  Since the quake, Landau’s plant has been running without incident or protest, and it does provide a public benefit—clean energy for the equivalent of 6000 homes—but the public scare was part of a trend that’s been dubbed “numbyism,” or “Not Under My Back Yard”—that is, growing resistance to new energy technologies meant to operate “under our feet.”  Just ask VatenFall, the Swedish energy giant.  Their experimental coal-fired power plant here in Spremsberg, on the other side of Germany, is designed to catch 90 percent of its CO₂ emissions, and pipe the gas more than a mile underground; where backers say, it will remain trapped forever.  The process is called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, and much of the world is pinning its climate hopes on the technology.  VatenFall’s plant is one of its first proving grounds.  It was supposed to open a year ago, but local resistance has so far kept it closed.  As in Landau, people here are afraid of its possible impacts, including earthquakes, or even escaping CO₂.  Jeff Chapman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, an industry group based in London, says he’s not surprised at the delay.

JEFF CHAPMAN:  I think it’s quite understandable that local people will be concerned to understand if there is any risk associated with CO₂.storage.

HADDEN:  Chapman says CCS is safe, even though it’s still largely untested.  But more important, he says, it’s indispensible.

CHAPMAN:  Unless we adopt Carbon Capture and Storage technology, there is absolutely no way whatsoever that we will be able to address climate change.  And that’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, for example.  It’s the conclusion of the European Commission.  And most people who know about this situation will realize that inevitably we are locked-in to burning fossil fuels …

HADDEN:  But environmental groups, such as Friends of the Earth, are backing nervous neighbors.  Tina Loeffelsint, of the German chapter, calls CCS “one giant question mark.”  She says nobody is really sure how long the CO₂.will stay underground or how it might react with rocks and minerals over time.  The unknowns, she says, make it too risky.

TINA LOEFFELSINT:  We have better and cheaper and reliable technologies at hand today, like renewable energies, efficiency technologies, with which Germany could easily reach its climate targets.  CCS, at this point in time, looks like a solution just for energy industry—for them to not change their mix of energy.

HADDEN:  Scientists working on CCS insist the technology isn’t just “smoke and mirrors.”  This is another test site, in [PH] Catseen, outside of Berlin.  Lead scientist, Hilke Wuerdeman says the goal is to develop better systems to monitor and control the gas once it’s underground.  CO₂.is a voracious solvent and can leach toxic minerals from the deep rocks into underground reservoirs of salt water.  Wuerdeman wants to make sure that mixture never reaches fresh water sources.

HILKE WUERDEMAN:  Of course, it’s all the part of the research to enhance the pressure only to an amount where fluids will not leave the reservoir.  So if the fluids may leave the reservoir, then it is possible that they reach a new reservoir.  But the main idea is to limit the pressure increase, so that you have no movement.

HADDEN:  Wuerdeman insists that Carbon Storage will bring minimal risks, and even less with constant monitoring.  But that begs the question of who should be responsible for such oversight.  Again, Tina Loeffelsint, from Friends of the Earth.

LOEFFELSINT:  If you assume that our government says the CO₂ would have to be stored safely and endlessly; and they mean like for 10,000 years or more; like the time span is just far too long.

HADDEN:  The uncertainty on this question has some investors hesitating, along with potential neighbors of CCS projects, and that raises still more questions about its potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions soon.  As it is, one Harvard study says the technology won’t be commercially viable for at least 20 years.  For The World, I’m Jerry Hadden, Ketzin Germany.

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