• Question: Will your work improve the environment?

    Asked by boxofstrawbs to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 23 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 23 Jun 2012:

      Hi boxofstrawbs,

      One of the things I work on is deep geological storage of greenhouse gasses (called CO2 Capture and Storage, CCS). CO2 is captured at coal-fired power stations, and pumped to suitable underground geological reservoirs, where it is permanently stored. This is a possible way to reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, which will hopefully improve the environment.

      In general, as a scientist there are probably loads of things you can work on that’ll help improve the environment.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      Hi boxofstrawbs,

      My work (I hope!) will increase our understanding of the Earths climate and how it changes, so while my work won’t directly clean up the environment, I hope that it will become part of the growing volume of science which shows we need to reduce our carbon emissions and take care of our environment as we only have one planet and it belongs equally to all of us, and as a result get us all imprroving it.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      hey boxofstrawbs,

      I work in climate science, and most of the research done here focuses on working out how different bits of the earth system work and interact with each other, and how this is likely to change in the future. My work wont directly help the environment right now, but it will help protect it in the future. So really helping prevent the negative impacts of global warming.

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      Like James Verdon I also work on Carbon capture and storage (CCS). Its a technology that hopes to stop the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increasing any more in the future. My work involves carrying out experiments with liquid carbon dioxide and the rocks that we want to store it in to see what will happen.

      This work will help us to work out what may happen underground, how safe it would be, how much we could store and how long it would take to store it (it is predicted that it will take thousands of years for the liquid carbon dioxide to be completly stored as solid minerals). If we could store lots of carbon dioxide underground from all the power stations either coal fired or gas fired and manfacturing industries such as cement works then we could help to keep the environment the same as it is already.

      I guess my work involves finding solutions to the problems that come from the world needing to use energy and hopefully preventing it from having a bad effect on the environment at the same time.

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