SUGAR LAND – Pranav Subhash has watched documentaries about carbon capture, which traps carbon dioxide so it can be repurposed for industrial uses or injected deep into the ground. The idea is to limit how much of the gas goes into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it contributes to the greenhouse effect and ultimately global warming.
The 13-year-old student at Dulles Middle School near Houston, whose mother works as a chemist for the Environmental Protection Agency, said he’s anxious to learn more about a technology that is decades old and starting to gain more traction across the globe and in a region that is one of the world’s foremost energy producers — and polluters.
“If we don’t change now, the world, it isn’t going to be a very bright place anymore,” Subhash said. “If this generation learns about it, then we can actually do something about it.”
Subhash and his classmates at Dulles, along with some other middle school students in the Gulf Coast region, will soon have that opportunity. His eighth-grade science teacher, Julia Dolive, is one of three middle school educators in the Houston and Corpus Christi areas who will be teaching lessons about carbon capture and storage this spring as part of their existing state-required curriculum about the carbon cycle and how it’s impacted by humans.
The teachers developed the lessons with help from the geosciences school at the University of Texas at Austin, which is leading a six-university consortium called the Texas-Louisiana Carbon Management Community. The other schools involved are Louisiana State University, the University of Houston, Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Texas A&M-Kingsville.
With the help of a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and a small but growing network of science teachers, educators are spearheading a grassroots educational initiative to provide information about carbon capture and storage along with its potential benefits. The goals are to eventually reduce carbon emissions caused by industry — thereby combatting climate change — and to train the next generation of workers in the energy sector.
“The more we learn, the more reason there is to be very anxious about the unmitigated buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Susan Hovorka, a senior research professor at UT-Austin who is leading the initiative. “Of course, there are a number of technologies, and we need all of them.”
Challenges ahead
Hovorka said there is skepticism about carbon capture both within the energy industry — because the practice is costly — and also among environmental advocates, who view the technology as an “excuse to continue burning fossil fuels,” she said. There also are questions about whether carbon dioxide injected into the ground will stay there indefinitely, although Hovorka said the technology has proven to be effective and is “safe by design.”