On a warm October morning in the middle of the Colorado mountains, dozens of leaders in carbon management were gathered, intensely focused on the task laid out before them.
Dr. Paul Hand, associate professor and director of Tapia Camps at Rice University, challenged the attendees of the 2024 CO2NNECT conference to build a carbon storage site at their tables in just a few short minutes. Their only materials were two plastic cups, a straw, some painter’s tape, dry pasta, and a few containers of Play-Doh.
Attendees could work together in teams or individually. Their mission was to construct a storage site that would allow them to inject carbon dioxide (represented with vegetable oil) into an underground saltwater reservoir without a leak. As teams injected their vegetable oil using a large syringe, they would displace the salt water (represented by a green liquid) which would flow up through the straw and into the second empty cup. The team that could successfully inject the most vegetable oil without a leak would win the game.
Education opportunities like this open doors to help the next generation play a pivotal role in our nationwide energy transition. Dr. Hand regularly conducts this activity over the course of several hours with high school students at a STEM summer camp at Rice University’s Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. There, students get to learn about the intricacies of carbon capture and storage and can put that knowledge into practice.
Currently, carbon capture and storage technology is expected to grow to a more than $40 billion industry by 2032. A necessary component in the fight against climate change, the technology promises to create jobs in construction, engineering, operations, and research in the decades to come. As career and training opportunities in this field continue to expand, the need for a strong and well-prepared workforce grows too. Students across the country learning about this technology today are poised to be leaders in that workforce in the years to come. In addition to positioning students for success in a changing economy, carbon capture and storage education helps to demystify what can sometimes be incorrectly interpreted as an “untested” practice.
To aid that demystification, the University of Wyoming CarbonSafe project developed an online tool to help visualize the scale of wells where captured carbon is stored. The tool lets users see the depth of a well (generally one to two miles below the earth’s surface) represented by school buses stacked end to end. That sack of school buses is then juxtaposed next to an image showing the various geologic layers of rock the injection well passes through as it is drilled. Simple educational tools like this make it easier to understand key components of the carbon storage process.
The Carbon Action Alliance recognizes the critical role education plays in the energy transition. The Action Alliance developed an online civic toolkit with resources dedicated to simplifying information about the carbon management process. This toolkit includes educational fliers that are designed to break down multiple components of carbon management into easy-to-digest. These resources make education about carbon management more accessible, helping expand opportunities for stakeholders, students, and communities to be more informed about the technology and its impacts.
Public education is a crucial tool for enhancing economic opportunities, centering equity, and fostering community agency in the deployment of carbon management technology nationwide. To access educational resources on carbon management and industrial decarbonization and learn about the alliance’s efforts to expand education, sign up for our newsletter and follow our LinkedIn page.