(Radio Iowa) – Geologists at the University of Iowa are leading a more than 11 MILLION dollar project to see if carbon can be successfully stored deep underground near a power plant in Council Bluffs. The study is exploring whether liquefied carbon could be injected into basalt rock a half mile underground. Ryan Clark is a geologist with the Iowa Geological Survey and the principal investigator of the study. “What we need to do is drill deep enough to grab some of these rocks and do some laboratory experiments to see if this will actually work or not,” he says, “and then use modeling software and other techniques to sort of evaluate if we think that it can be up-scaled to to handle the amount of emissions that the Department of Energy thinks is going to be, you know, beneficial.”

The U-S Department of Energy is funding the research. Clark says one of the most important parts of the project is measuring potential seismic activity. “It’s up to us to gather as much data as we can and really comb through it to see if we can identify any of those potential hazards ahead of time, because injecting again underground is, in some cases, offsetting the natural balance,” he says, “and so we have to make sure that we’re doing this responsibly and that, you know, there aren’t going to be any hazards later on down the line.”

Clark made his comments during a recent appearance on Iowa Public Radio. The federal government offers 85-dollars’ worth of tax credits for every ton of carbon stored in rock.