Norway is the only country to pump gas emissions beneath the sea floor, at the Sleipner field in the North Sea.

By KATE GALBRAITH


In an ambitious proposal to counter global warming, an upstart power developer wants to build a coalfired electric plant on the outskirts of New York City that would capture its emissions of carbon dioxide and pump the pollutant 113 kilometers offshore. The gas would be injected into sandstone 1.6 kilometers beneath the ocean floor in the hope that it would stay there for eons.

Experts have thought for years that capturing the emissions from power plants will be a crucial technology for limiting climate change. But high cost projections and scientific uncertainty have meant that progress on the technique has been limited.

Now SCS Energy, based in Concord, Massachusetts, contends not only that it can build the world’s first such plant and get it to work, but also do so profitably, despite costs that could approach $5 billion. If it succeeded, the plant might become a model that could be copied elsewhere.

A key to the proposal is location: an old industrial site near the shore in Linden, New Jersey, just across the Arthur Kill waterway from Staten Island. Generating power there would allow the company to sell it into one of America’s most expensive markets, and injecting the gas deep beneath the ocean floor, where pressure would help keep it down, would eliminate some of the uncertainty that might attend a similar project on land.

The proposal raises many environmental and political questions, and it is far from clear that the company can overcome the opposition that seems to crop up to any new power plant in the Northeast. But if the proposal wins approval and if it succeeds in burying 90 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions, as planned, it could be a major step toward finding a technological fix for global warming.

“If this succeeds, it’s going to be very hard for utilities to say,‘Oh no no, you can’t do this,’“ said Daniel Schrag, a Harvard University geochemist whose work inspired the proposal.

The plan may get an attentive hearing in Washington, where President Obama has installed a team that is determined to put new clean-energy plans into effect. The Linden proposal builds on the work of Mr. Schrag and one of his graduate students, Kurt Zenz House. In a paper in 2006, they argued that layers of rock beneath the ocean floor might be the best place to bury the huge amounts of carbon dioxide that industrial societies emit into the atmosphere.

SCS Energy, which hired Mr. Schrag as a consultant after learning of that work, has specialized in tricky projects.

The company has struck a deal to pay $95 million for an old DuPont chemical factory site at Grasselli Point in Linden. The site is near rail lines and barges that can deliver coal. More than a dozen permits are needed.

A buried steel pipe, 61 centimeters in diameter, would transport liquid carbon dioxide from the power plant to a site 113 kilometers offshore, beneath nearly a kilometer of water. A well would inject the carbon dioxide to a depth of about 1.6 kilometers below the sea floor, into a layer of ancient sandstone. Mr. Schrag said the carbon dioxide would stay there for millions of years, kept down by a thick layer of mud and the weight of the sea. Not even earthquakes or underwater landslides would be likely to dislodge it, he said.

“The worst thing that could happen is a little bit of CO2 escaping into the atmosphere,”said Dean Malouta, the manager of technology for exploration and production for Shell’s Americas region, which has financed some related research.

Worldwide, more than a dozen projects are under way to store power plant emissions. Norway is the only country to have undertaken a large project to bury greenhouse gas emissions under the sea floor, at the Sleipner gas field 250 kilometers off the coast in the North Sea. That project has been going safely for 13 years, but it buries less than a quarter of the amount of carbon dioxide as proposed in New Jersey.

Environmental groups have been divided over whether this approach is a good idea.“The burden of proof is clearly going to be on the project developers”to prove the geological suitability of undersea storage, said Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund.