Friday, July 25, 2008

Regulation

It's obvious really - before you can pump CO2 underground (at least inside of national boundaries) you need to have some form of legal framework.

The UK is, I believe, working on this - however so to is the US.

According to point carbon both a US House Committee and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are working on legislation to support CCS.

Good news - provided of course that the rules they decide upon are sensible. In the UK I've heard an industry spokesman describe a risk that the health and safety executive would require any CO2 pipeline to be routed up to half a mile distant from any dwelling. The idea would be that were the pipline to leak everyone would be safe from the CO2.
Apart from (effectively) blocking the introduction of CO2 pipelines this would be pointless - afterall pipelines would always be designed to leak before they break - meaning that the risk of catastropic pipeline explosion is almost none existant. Any CO2 leakage would just be a thin plume that wouldn't cause any harm to anyone - it would dissipate into the air very rapidly.

As such I don't believe that such a stipulation would either be required, or introduced.

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