Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Mix (Tony Kovscek)
What's the future for fossil fuels? Explore Prof. Kovscek's perspective on coal's role and more.
Transcript: Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Mix
There are ways out there to lessen the possible impacts of fossil fuels. We talked a little bit about acid forming compounds. And there's certainly almost, at this point, off the shelf ways of dealing with that -- of removing those acid components from gases that are produced when we combust fossil fuels. But even from the CO2 produced, we could try to do something useful with that CO2. It's possible that you could take the stack gas from a power plant and remove the CO2 and then use that in an industrial process. You could use that to improve oil recovery or gas recovery -- natural gas recovery. So we could actually put it back into the ground and hopefully it would stay there. There would still be quite a few scientific questions to answer about that. This whole idea is called carbon sequestration. So could we take fossil fuels, utilize the energy in them, perhaps produce electricity or hydrogen, and then do something useful or perhaps just put the CO2 away back into the earth, where it wouldn't bother us for a substantial portion of time.