Mr. John Osborne at the Natural Resources Committee

I don't want to make a big thing out of this, but there are small uses for CO₂ right now, such as in greenhouses and to make dry ice. There are some mineralization projects beginning to take place; the CO₂ could be turned into useful minerals.

I mentioned earlier that we're involved with Shell Gas, where CO₂ could be used for enhanced gas recovery. This is new. No one has ever, in a Shell Gas play, used CO₂ to enhance gas recovery. It's been done in conventional fields.

We're also involved in deep geothermal systems, which are called enhanced geothermal systems. This is very new. It is early days. We have a potential project sitting on a hot spot in Maine. The concept is to drill deep and inject supercritical CO₂. The moment the supercritical CO₂ hits the hot rock, you get a tremendous pressure and temperature effect, which you then bring to the surface and run through your turbines to create electricity. Then you recapture your CO₂, compress it, and put it down.

The long-term area in which I think very little work has been done, which has tremendous potential, is microbial conversion of CO₂.