Another Great Carbon Sequestration Web Site

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Overview of the Carbon Sequestration Research Project Data Base

Carbon sequestration is the removal of greenhouse gases either directly
from the exhaust streams of industrial or utility plants or indirectly from the
atmosphere, and storing them long-term so that they cannot interact with the
climate system. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) believes there may be
new, innovative concepts for sequestration. DOE is developing a roadmap for
setting R&D directions related to carbon sequestration, and is conducting
research in the following areas:

· system studies and assessments
· enhanced natural sinks
· capture and separations technology
· geologic storage
· ocean sequestration; and
· chemical and biological fixation and reuse.

Website Contents

This Web site organizes and presents information on carbon sequestration research projects. It consists of extracts from three federal government data bases, plus other carbon
sequestration Websites, miscellaneous documents, and papers and presentations.

1. F.R.E.D. Database. "FRED" is an acronym for "Fossil Research and
Engineering Database." It was developed at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy in the
early 1990s. This database tracks project information within the Office of
Fossil Energy. The data on these projects tends to be relatively complete and
current through mid-2005.

2. OSTI Database. DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information
(OSTI), within the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (OASCR) in
DOE's Office of Science (SC) is responsible for leading the Department's
Technical Information Management Program (TIMP) and for providing direction and
coordination for the dissemination of scientific and technical information (STI)
resulting from DOE research and development (R&D) and environmental
programs. The R&D Tracking System currently provides access to about 22,000
R&D projects ongoing within the Department. The carbon sequestration
projects extracted and presented here represent DOE-wide information into
FY2002, with most projects most recently updated in August 2005.

3. RaDiUS Database. RaDiUS stands for "Research and Development in
the United States," and is the first comprehensive database that tracks the
research and development activities and resources of the government. RaDiUS has
been developed by RAND, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation
(NSF), to support the work of RAND's Science & Technology Policy Institute
(S&TPI), the federally funded research and development center (FFRDC)
serving the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the
National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). The RaDiUS database contains
over 500,000 records. The carbon sequestration projects extracted and presented
here were most recently updated in August 2005, but typically represent Federal
government-wide information from previous fiscal years.

4. Other Carbon Sequestration Websites. These are a set of other Web
pages related to the topic of carbon sequestration. The sites tend to be broad
in coverage, as project-specific activities are generally categorized with
“Miscellaneous Documents” (below). These sites are not intended to be an
exhaustive tabulation, but instead to supplement the project descriptions found
in the other data bases.

5. Miscellaneous News and Documents.
These documents represent miscellaneous news items, press releases, and Web
pages related to carbon sequestration activities. They are not intended to be an
exhaustive tabulation, but instead to supplement the project descriptions found
in the other data bases.

6. Papers, Reports, and Presentations.
This collection of documents covers various reports and conference presentations
related to carbon sequestration activities. These too are not intended to be an
exhaustive tabulation, but a partial selection of publicly available
information. Most of the entries in this section will take you to the original
source, and away from carbonsequestration.us website.

Developing the Databases

Each of the databases represents information sources
substantially broader than the single topic of carbon sequestration. Further,
due to the large number of overall projects contained, it was necessary to
develop a process for filtering and screening projects in order to identify the
most relevant projects for inclusion in this database.

The first step for each database was filtering. In FRED and OSTI,
project titles and descriptions were scanned for the following five keywords:
carbon, CO2, sequestration, greenhouse, and climate. In RaDiUS, because of the
vastly larger number of total projects, only three keywords were used in the
filtering: carbon, CO2, and sequestration. Project ID #s were then compared, and
duplicate entries (those containing more than one of the keywords) were
eliminated.

The next step was screening, and involved individually examining each
of the project descriptions for the several thousand candidate projects that
passed the filtering tests. For each candidate project, a judgment was made as
to whether to include or exclude it for further consideration. For most
projects, this was straightforward. However, there are some gray areas where the
relevance for carbon sequestration is less clear. Several of these are
land-based studies that are determining growth and carbon accumulation of plants
in response to higher CO2 levels. Some were ocean studies looking at carbon
budgets and ocean circulation. While we did not include all of these projects,
we did tend to include most of those that had some potential connection to
understanding how carbon is captured, its likely fate over time, and how our
activities could change that. However, we tended to exclude projects that did
not have a potential connection to our ability to effect sequestration, but
instead were directed more toward observation of carbon measurements and
impacts.

For each project that passed the screening process, a separate HTML
page was prepared to display the data. Additionally, summary tables were
prepared for each of the five datasets, where each project is a clickable link
to the detailed data.

This data base is a work in progress. We hope you find it useful, and
would appreciate your comments and thoughts for future directions.