Scientists are prying 8,000 feet beneath the Earth's crust. Their goal: to explore a geological formation that underlies Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York that they believe could be usable as a storage locker for carbon emissions from coal and natural gas plants.
The intended receptacle for the carbon dioxide is the Newark Basin, layers of rock and sand thousands of feet below the Garden State. It was born in the late Triassic period, from 201 million to 251 million years ago, when supercontinent Pangea was still splitting. The Atlantic didn't yet exist, and only a lake separated the Jersey Shore from the coast of Mauritania (now near the Sahara Desert in Africa).
Now federal officials and academics are exploring the Newark Basin with an eye toward the future, to see if it can hold gasses produced through the use of fossil fuels.
The idea is that carbon emissions would be pressurized and piped deep underground, away from the atmosphere, where they would remain indefinitely.
"Here in the metropolitan New York area, in New York, New Jersey, there's a lot of hydrocarbons being burned, a lot of CO2 generated," explained Rutgers professor Dennis Kent. "The idea is to find a place near where the CO2 is generated to find a resting home."
Kent is working with experts from Rutgers, Columbia University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia Technologies exploring the idea for the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
The team has about $10 million in federal money to spend in its research, as do similar groups of scientists looking at the Black Warrior Basin in Alabama and the Rock Springs Uplift in Wyoming.
"Congress said go out and characterize 10 specific sites, and gather even more specific sites," explained NETL's John Litynski. "These are the first to actually complete their drilling operations."
The first drilling site in this round of funding was off the New York State Thruway just north of the Jersey border, where scientists extracted core samples from around an 8,000-foot section of the Earth's history.
The workers used a tall drill rig suitable for mineral exploration and attracted their fair share of attention from curious passing motorists, Litynski said.
They already had some shallower cores of earth in hand from earlier studies near Princeton and Rutgers in New Brunswick.
Litynski said the government has spent about $1.1 billion since 1997 on the technology known as carbon sequestration, which some experts think is necessary to containing emissions that drive global warming.
"Carbon capture and storage technologies offer the potential for reducing CO2 emissions and, in turn, mitigating global climate change without adversely influencing energy use or hindering economic growth," states a NETL fact sheet.
Some environmentalists disagree with that: Greenpeace International put out a report calling the technology a "dangerous distraction" and questioning its safety and efficacy.
Some New Jersey environmentalists agree.
"Whenever you hide (carbon) in a rock formation, whether it's off the coast or on land, if you have an earthquake or natural pressure from gas in the land trying to rise, there could be a fissure or a crack and it could wind up getting released," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. "What's disturbing is the Newark Basin is under one of the more populated areas of the country. If there was a breach, it could be catastrophic; you could be jeopardizing the lives of thousands of people."
The Newark Basin may be one of the first sites to be explored, but it's a relative blank slate compared with the others, since New Jersey hasn't traditionally been drilled much by the oil and gas industry.
No conclusions have been drawn yet, but the work shows promise, according to Paul Olsen, a Columbia professor who works in Palisades, N.Y., at the school's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
"We don't have a lot of data at the moment, because we're still in the process of the analyses," Olsen said. "The assumption was that you'd have extensive sandstones. That is borne out by the new results."
Sandstone is good news because it's a porous type of rock that carbon emissions can be stored in and around: Picture a bucket of golf balls, explained Kent.
"If you had a bunch of golf balls and you look at 'em, there's going to be spaces in between. Many sediment particles are round, they're not square and they can't fit together exactly," Kent said. "That creates space that, in our case, we're looking for so we can push some of the CO2 (emissions in). What you need for carbon sequestration is, you've got to put it somewhere."
But that doesn't mean compressed liquid or gas CO2 will be pumped under the Garden State any time soon, even after $1 billion of federal spending exploring the option of sequestration.
It's likely to be many years before the Newark Basin is pumped full of carbon emissions, if it ever is.
"This is just a first step," Kent said. "Chances are in our lifetimes, it may never be used for this purpose. It's just to get an assessment for the potentials."
Eliot Caroom: (973) 392-7919 or ecaroom@starledger.com