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PKU and Berkeley Lab Forge Ties on
Carbon Capture and Storage Research
PKU NEWS 2009--11—23
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=259056584
Peking University, Nov. 23: Peking University and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in the US agreed on Nov. 12th to jointly pursue the development of safe
and effective carbon capture and storage techniques.
A memorandum of understanding (MOU) was entered between the University of
California, which manages Berkeley Lab, and Peking University. It was signed by
Don DePaolo, director of Berkeley Lab‘s Earth Sciences Division and professor of
Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Prof. Chen
Shiyi, Dean of PKU‘s College of Engineering (COE).
This technology holds strong promise to help mitigate climate change by capturing
carbon dioxide from major sources, such as coal-burning power plants, and injecting
it deep underground for permanent storage.
Prof. Chen believes that effective measures must be taken to deal with the green
house effects. The technology of carbon capture and storage, though not yet widely
applied in a large scale around the world, is significant in meeting the challenges of
climate change, especially for China, a major coal producer and energy consumer.
The collaboration was cemented at the China-US Workshop on Carbon Capture &
Storage, a two-day event sponsored by the Philomathia Foundation through a grant
to UC Berkeley. The workshop, held at Peking University, brought together scientists
from Berkeley Lab, Stanford University, and several Chinese research institutions.
"The MOU is a formalization of our intent to jointly use our resources and share
information so that we can pursue research that will help accelerate the deployment
of carbon capture and storage in both countries over the next 10 to 20 years," says
DePaolo.
The importance of the memorandum of understanding is underscored by the fact that
China and the US together are responsible for 40 percent of the world‘s emissions of
carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.
Compounding the problem, fossil fuels such as coal are likely to remain cheap and
plentiful source of energy for decades to come - thus continuing their potential
contributions to climate change.
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