Your letters: Carbon cemeteries

Paper Edition | Page: 8

We are told that carbon dioxide is such a dangerous gas that we must capture and “bury it deep down below”.

When oxidized by combustion in fires and engines, or digested in stomachs, or decayed in soil or compost, every bit of organic matter is recycled into the harmless natural atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide. Plants extract this plant food from the atmosphere, reuse the carbon, and recycle the oxygen for use by all forms of animal life.

Every ton of coal burnt produces about three tons of carbon dioxide containing over two tons of oxygen and under one ton of carbon. Thus with every ton of carbon buried, more than twice as much life-sustaining oxygen must also be sacrificed.

To achieve these mass burials, more coal has to be mined and burnt to produce the energy for gas collection, compression, pumping, drilling disposal holes, and to manufacture the materials for storage tanks, pumps and pipes.

To willfully waste so much energy entombing the two most valuable life-supporting elements in the biosphere is financially and biologically suicidal. These costs are real, unavoidable and undeniable. There are no proven benefits.

Viv Forbes,
Queensland, Australia