University to use $20-million grant to examine response to global warming

Ecology and evolutionary biology professor Stephen Pacala did not believe Princeton had a good chance of winning British Petroleum's $15-million research grant.

Pacala had been on sabbatical last spring when BP approached the University, peddling the grant to promote research into addressing the environmental problem of global warming.

In addition to Pacala — a leading scientist at the Princeton Environmental Institute — researchers at MIT and Stanford also applied for the funding.

And Pacala believed one of those institutions was the likely choice.

"Stanford and MIT have the big engineering departments. They're the ones who are really well-known with this kind of research," Pacala said. "They have the technical support, and already had a relationship with BP working on projects like these in the past."

So Pacala took a different approach. Rather than emphasizing the technical aspects of a potential program to store carbon underground, he attacked the problem from an environmentalist's angle.

"We were looking less at how we could do it," he explained, "and more at whether we should do it."

Pacala's approach worked, and the University scored $15 million from BP — along with $5 million from Ford — to establish a new research project titled the Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

The reasoning behind CMI is simple enough. The burning of most fossil fuels results in the emission of carbon dioxide. In high quantities in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is one of the gases that causes the greenhouse effect — the widely documented ecological phenomenon characterized by continually increasing temperatures.

One of the goals of CMI is to investigate whether the large quantities of carbon dioxide being produced can be safely stored underground, according to Pacala, one of the co-directors of the project.

Because water has a capacity to dissolve carbon dioxide, the captured carbon dioxide could be piped into large porous rock formations a kilometer or more beneath the surface of the earth, where the gas could dissipate slowly over thousands of years.

According to Robert Socolow, who co-directs CMI with Pacala, the grant funding from BP and Ford will be used primarily to hire additional researchers.