Gorgon

I'm looking at the report on Barrow Island, Australia. They've got a saltwater reservoir 2.3 km underneath it, into which they're injecting 3.3 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year in an attempt to sequester the stuff and reduce global warming. This sequestration experiment is called Gorgon, after the Greek mythological entities who could turn humans to crystalline calcium carbonate statues.

3.3 megatonnes is a lot. it's 3.3 million million grams. 3,300,000,000,000 g of carbon dioxide. If that much carbon dioxide escapes, it will form a bubble with a volume of 1.8 billion cubic metres at room temperature and pressure. The land area of Australia is about 8000 billion square metres. That's great, because it means that if Barrow Island goes off after one year, it will only cover Australia to a depth of 0.225 centimetres. No big deal.

Atlantis, on the other hand, would be overwhelmed. At only about 0.7 billion square metres, we'd be covered to a depth of more than 250 centimetres in carbon dioxide. Most of us would be dead.

This is all crazy reasoning, actually. What is more likely is that the dense bubble of 1.8 billion cubic metres would move bloblike, shoved around by the winds, randomly killing people by asphyxiation. Who would it kill? I don't know; maybe people running the Gorgon Gas Project.

What's that, you ask? Haha, well it's funny, but carbon sequestration tends to coexist with petrochemical plants. The Gorgon Gas Project is designed to produce 1.1 billion billion cubic metres of natural gas a year. That's a billion times larger than the carbon dioxide annual input.

Amazing, those Aussies. You should go look at their top-secret wind turbines in the desert too.