A study released Wednesday by the United States Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory says carbon capture and storage (CCS) would allow China to tap its extensive domestic fossil fuel reserves and still efficiently cut CO2 emissions. CCS is a technology that traps emissions from coal-burning plants and stores it in rock formations deep underground.

China is the world's biggest greenhouse gas producer.

"Conventional thinking had been that China did not have a lot of storage for carbon. But it turns out China does," said Robert Dahowski, lead scientist for the research. "Enough for many decades, perhaps hundreds of years."

The study reveals that China has more than 1,620 large stationary CO2 emission sources, which include coal-fired power plants, cement kilns, steel mills, refineries and other industrial facilities. Collectively, they emit more than 3.8 billion metric tons of CO2 each year, 70 percent from coal-fired power plants.

"For the first time ever, we have quantified the potential for future large-scale carbon capture and storage deployment within China," said Dahowski. "Our work suggests that CO2 capture and storage can provide a key element of China's portfolio of options for cost effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

The study's release comes on the heels of a speech by U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu Monday calling for "widespread, affordable" carbon storage in the next decade. Chu pointed out that coal supplies 25 percent of the globe's energy and is responsible for 40 percent of carbon emissions.

According to the International Energy Agency, just to transport China and India's greenhouse gases to underground repositories, 62,000 miles of pipelines would need to be constructed at an estimated cost of $275 billion.

But the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study found that more than 90 percent of China's power plants and CO2-emitting facilities are located within 100 miles of a potential carbon storage reservoir. So CO2 capture and storage technologies could be widely deployed across most regions of China, the study says, with little need to build extensive long-distance CO2 pipelines.

"A lot of the policy dialogue and technical discussions have this really sharp dichotomy -- either you use coal and bad things happen to the environment, or you forgo coal and bad things happen to the economy," said James Dooley a scientist at the laboratory and an author of the report, The New York Times reports. "We're trying to say maybe there's a third way here," he said, referring to CCS.

The five-year research project was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, China's Ministry of Science and Technology, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, sponsors of the Global Energy Technology Strategy Program and U.S.-based Leonardo Technologies.

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