MSU scientists playing key role in effort to slow global warming

Contact: Phil Hearn

STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State scientists are playing a key role in the nation's effort to slow global warming by reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions caused primarily by the expanding use of fossil fuels for energy.

Three researchers from the university's Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory--DIAL, for short--are members of a regional team seeking the best ways to capture and isolate gases that could contribute to global climate change.

"Congratulations to Jeff Lindner, Chuji Wang and F-X Han for being a part of the Southeast's winning team for the Phase II carbon sequestration partnerships," said former DIAL director John Plodinec. "It provides an opportunity to show off our instrumentation capability and to have an impact on how our country addresses carbon management."

Colin Scanes, MSU's vice president for research and graduate studies, said the effort illustrates DIAL's ongoing development of "innovative solutions to some of today's most pressing problems involving energy, the environment, infrastructure, and industrial processes."

In Phase I, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory created a North American network of seven federal, state and private sector partnerships to determine the most suitable technologies, regulations and infrastructure for future carbon capture, storage and sequestration in different geographic areas. The network includes more than 216 organizations in 40 states, three American Indian nations and Canada.

Under Phase II, MSU and other members of the Southeastern Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership are conducting geological sequestration field tests that could help the U.S. stabilize atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide without having to make large-scale and potentially costly changes to existing energy infrastructures.

"Our portion of the contract is $400,000 for four years, including $300,000 from DOE through the Southern States Energy Board, the prime contractor, and nearly $100,000 in matching funds from MSU's Bagley College of Engineering," said Lindner, a DIAL research professor and physical chemist who is the principal MSU investigator.

Wang is an assistant research professor, physicist and expert in applications of Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy, which can detect a wide range of gaseous contaminants and environmental pollutants; Han an assistant research professor and soil scientist who will be involved in carbon accounting and developing protocols to measure, mitigate and verify the sequestration experiments.

The CRDS technology, Lindner explained, can measure isotopic concentrations of carbon dioxide stored in deep geological reservoirs and pinpoint any leaks.

"Cavity ring-down technique will play an important role in measurement, mitigation and verification in the carbon sequestration program," said Wang, who, with Plodinec, used the technology last year to invent a breath analyzer that detects diabetes.

Vegetation and soils are widely recognized as carbon storage sinks. According to DOE's Office of Fossil Energy, the global biosphere absorbs roughly two billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, an amount equal to roughly one-third of all global carbon emissions from human activity.

Terrestrial carbon sequestration is defined as either the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere or the prevention of CO2 net emissions into the atmosphere from the terrestrial ecosystems such as forests, agricultural lands, biomass croplands, deserts and degraded lands, and boreal wetlands and peatlands.

"Our previous study shows that Mississippi could have 48 percent of its annual greenhouse gas emissions potentially offset by annual activities directed toward terrestrial carbon sequestration," said Han.

The Southeast partnership--representing Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina--will pinpoint carbon dioxide sources and sinks, as well as transport requirements, for the nine states and enter the data into a geographical information system database. An outreach plan then will be developed to help identify and implement regional CO2 sequestration measures.

The Southeastern partnership is led by the Southern States Energy Board, based at Norcross, Ga. In addition to MSU, the team includes personnel from the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, Electric Power Research Institute, Virginia Tech University, Geological Survey of Alabama, Augusta Systems, Advanced Resources International, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information, contact Lindner at (662) 325-7641 or lindner@dial.msstate.edu; Wang at 325-2105 or wang@dial.msstate.edu; or Han at 325-7380 or han@dial.msstate.edu.