What if we transformed carbon dioxide from being a waste product into being a huge battery to help even out our energy supply? We could make carbon storage pay off, while solving problems of intermittent energy supply from renewables.
So say Tom Buscheck from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues who presented a design for this type of energy storage at the European Geosciences Union general assembly last week in Vienna, Austria.
Their design would be able to store the excess energy produced by renewable and conventional power sources when demand is low and, at the same time, lock up the major cause of global warming – carbon dioxide.