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Carbon nation: from coast to coast, federally funded scientists race to capture C[O.sub.2].

Article Excerpt
In March 2001, when George W. Bush announced that the United States would "unsign" the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to limit the amount of carbon dioxide released into Earth's atmosphere, he did offer environmentalists one unswerving promise: despite its abandonment of the treaty, the United States would, he said, continue "working with our allies to reduce greenhouse gases." It would seem that, in the ensuing years, Bush has done little to fulfill this promise. Or has he? In a little-known program--one that may, in fact, be the administration's only substantive project to reduce levels of airborne C[O.sub.2]--the Department of Energy has allocated $110 million for research into "carbon sequestration," a tantalizing process by which, rather than curtailing the use of oil and coal, the carbon-dioxide emissions from them could simply be captured and disposed of after the fact. The DOE has mobilized the nation's top scientists to find ways of storing this carbon-dioxide waste here on Earth, in everything from empty oil wells to genetically engineered plants. Like the Manhattan Project scientists in the 1940s, these tireless genius-patriots are racing to win a war: the climate's attack on our unfettered use of fossil fuels. Seldom has the imagination of our nation's scientists been spurred to such lengths.

Last summer, along the banks of the Ohio River near New Haven, West Virginia, researchers from Battelle Memorial Institute drilled down 9,200 feet...