Carbon Sequestration Seen as Key

It sounds like a boring bit of bureaucracy with a few too many polysyllabic words, but the Environmental Protection Agency's move to set rules for carbon sequestration could be an important step in the nation's efforts to both take action to staunch the pollution fueling global warming and to boost the nation's "energy independence."

Carbon sequestration, in this context, is the capture and burying of carbon from coal. The processes, in use in some places where the waste carbon dioxide can be pumped into oil fields to boost production, aims to strip carbon before coal is burned, capture it, and bury it deep underground in geologic formations that -- hopefully -- won't release it into the atmosphere.

Coal is relatively cheap and abundant domestically, and it supplies half the nation's energy, but at a significant cost to the environment. Acid rain, smog, toxic mercury and global warming are all fueled by the emissions from coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. While modern pollution controls can strip most of the worst pollutants from the smokestack steam, carbon dioxide flows unfettered.

In other words, coal is most likely a part of the nation's energy future, at least it's near future. So finding a way to cut emissions of carbon at coal-fired plants both new and old is a strategy worth exploring. The EPA's plan to regulate the way carbon is stored in the ground is one step toward making sure that process doesn't do more harm than good.

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