Perceptions of Manipulation and Judgments of Illegitimacy: Pitfalls in the Use of Emphasis Framing when Communicating about CO2 Capture and Storage

The mitigation of climate change requires reductions in the amount of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere. One way to achieve this in the short run is through the implementation of CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) technology. The viability of CCS not only depends on technical and regulatory issues, but also on public attitudes. Communication plays an important role in shaping these attitudes. This paper reports on two experiments performed to examine effects of emphasis framing in CCS communications, meaning that greater weight is given to advantages of CCS over disadvantages or vice versa. Although emphasis framing can be effective in shaping attitudes, our findings suggest that there may be long-term costs to using this communication technique as it can be perceived as manipulative. Moreover, emphasis framing is judged as relatively illegitimate when the source is expected to be impartial rather than biased.     

Numerical investigation concerning the impact of CO2 geologic storage on regional groundwater flow

Large-scale storage of carbon dioxide in saline aquifers may cause considerable pressure perturbation and brine migration in deep rock formations, which may have a significant influence on the regional groundwater system. With the help of parallel computing techniques, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale numerical simulation of CO₂ geologic storage that predicts not only CO₂ migration, but also its impact on regional groundwater flow. As a case study, a hypothetical industrial-scale CO₂ injection in Tokyo Bay, which is surrounded by the most heavily industrialized area in Japan, was considered, and the impact of CO₂ injection on near-surface aquifers was investigated, assuming relatively high seal-layer permeability (higher than 10 microdarcy). A regional hydrogeological model with an area of about 60 km × 70 km around Tokyo Bay was discretized into about 10 million gridblocks. To solve the high-resolution model efficiently, we used a parallelized multiphase flow simulator TOUGH2-MP/ECO2N on a world-class high performance supercomputer in Japan, the Earth Simulator. In this simulation, CO₂ was injected into a storage aquifer at about 1 km depth under Tokyo Bay from 10 wells, at a total rate of 10 million tons/year for 100 years. Through the model, we can examine regional groundwater pressure buildup and groundwater migration to the land surface. The results suggest that even if containment of CO₂ plume is ensured, pressure buildup on the order of a few bars can occur in the shallow confined aquifers over extensive regions, including urban inlands.