SEQUESTRATION

Two Department of Energy Awards Will Allow ISGS to Develop New Technologies

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS) to develop a technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) from coal-fired power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants emitted about 1,964 million metric tonnes of CO₂ in 2005. In the Illinois Basin, 126 power plants emitted about 273 million metric tonnes of CO₂ in 2005, of which 98% were contributed by the coal-fired plants. Yongqi Lu, principal investigator and ISGS chemical engineer, will lead the 3-year, $700,000 DOE project. Calgon Carbon Corporation (CCC) has also committed an additional $100,000 for in-kind contributions in support of this project.

The ISGS team of Yongqi Lu and Massoud Rostam-Abadi will collaborate with the CCC and Professor Mark Rood, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to advance an integrated vacuum carbonate absorption process (IVCAP) for post-combustion CO₂ capture. The development of the IVCAP was initiated in 2004 by the ISGS chemical engineers Yongqi Lu, Scott Chen, and Massoud Rostam-Abadi with support from the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC). A U.S. patent application ... more on carbon sequestration

EVENTS

Spring Geological Science Field Trips Popular with Participants

Approximately 100 people attended the Illinois State Geological Survey spring Geological Science Field Trips on April 25 and May 31, 2008. The field trips highlighted the geology and natural resources of the Horseshoe Lake State Conservation Area and surrounding areas and included six stops within Alexander County.

The first field trip stop was south of Miller City at the base of the Santa Fe Levee. There participants viewed the landscape changes that occurred following the levee breach during the Great Flood of 1993. The second stop was to an Eocene age sand and gravel deposit within Black Powder Hollow, south of Thebes, where a large number of participants collected a variety of agates. The third stop was Rock Springs Hollow, where the Ordovician age Girardeau Limestone is ... more on the field trips

HIGHLIGHTS

Abandoned Mine Maps
Delivered to IDOT

Mapping of abandoned mines has been completed for 13 7.5-minute quadrangles in Jackson, Williamson, Franklin, Hamilton, and White Counties. Maps for those quadrangles, accompanied by directories containing detailed information on the mine histories and sources of information, have been delivered in both paper and digital formats to the Illinois Department of Transportation, the project sponsor, and are being released to the public at this time. The new maps are for the Carbondale, De Soto, Gorham, Oraville, Pomona, Christopher, Sesser, Ewing, Norris City, McLeansboro, Thackeray, Macedonia, and Enfield Quadrangles. The maps and directories will help government planners, developers, and private citizens to identify areas that have been undermined. (Contacts: Cheri Chenoweth, Jennifer Obrad, and Alan Myers)

Every engineering project and many land-use planning efforts require accurate height measurement, which, in turn, requires a datum-consistent vertical and horizontal statewide network of ... more reports