Full of gas

If it wasn't for the fact that there's potentially money to be made off it, this would be a really odd program for an administration that denies climate change is a problem.

Casper, Wyo. (AP, January 28) - The government is trying to bury something at its Teapot Dome oil field again. Not secret oil leases, as it did during an infamous scandal of the 1920s, but carbon dioxide - lots of it.

In hopes of developing a process that could slow global warming, the Energy Department wants to inject the greenhouse gas underground into depleted oil reservoirs after converting it into a liquid form. ...

Used in enhanced oil recovery for decades, pumping carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs is being touted by the Bush administration as one of the most promising ways to counter the greenhouse effect. ...

"The long-term plan is to encourage the growth of a new private sector sequestration industry," [Dag Nummedal, director of the University of Wyoming Institute for Energy Research] said. ...

The storage process - particularly compressing the CO2 - is expensive. Some estimates put it as high as $100 per ton, though Nummedal and others said they don't yet have cost estimates for Teapot Dome.

Anything - anything - ANYTHING - so long as it doesn't involve stopping wasting energy, so long as it doesn't involve cutting the profits of Big Energy, so long as it doesn't require the rest of us to do a damn thing or think about our impact on the environment.