As expected...

Back in 2009 alone (go on, search "carbon capture" in the search bar over on the right), I had six posts about why CO2 sequestration seemed very, very unlikely to work.  One of them ended:

That CCS is being promoted so heavily seems simply to be a triumph of an industry's self preservation instinct over common sense.

Proving again that my sound judgement deserves reward with, I don't know, the leadership of a small principality if not the entire country, we had this story last weekend about how government money put into the idea by former PM Rudd has pretty much led to nothing. 

And now an article in PNAS that (naturally) Andrew Bolt highlights, argues that it's unlikely to be a long term solution anyway:

We argue here that there is a high probability that earthquakes will be triggered by injection of large volumes of CO₂ into the brittle rocks commonly found in continental interiors. Because even small- to moderate-sized earthquakes threaten the seal integrity of CO₂ repositories, in this context, large-scale CCS is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mind you, there had been an article also in PNAS earlier in the year estimated that sequestration could work for the US.   Clearly, this is an area of some disagreement, but are you going to spend billions of dollars on an idea when no one really knows if it's a proper solution? 

I don't think so.   My advice is to drop it.   Put all this money into other clean energy research.   Let me organise an international conference about that and get a scientific and engineering consensus as to which forms of nuclear or other energy to best pursue for both fast deployment now, and future development.   I'd probably do a better job than what's being done internationally now anyway.