There’s been some talk of storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide underground in an effort to combat global warming. But the law of unintended consequences may have other ideas. “Sequestration” may not be easy to do because of the potential for triggering small- to moderate-sized earthquakes, according to Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback. “It may not take a very big earthquake to damage the seal of an underground reservoir that has been pumped full of carbon dioxide.”
The other complication, Zoback said, is that for sequestration to make a significant contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the volume of gas injected into reservoirs annually would have to be almost the same as the amount of fluid now being produced by the oil and gas industry each year. This would likely require thousands of injection sites around the world.
