Law Commons^™

Climate Change, Carbon Sequestration, And Property Rights, Alexandra B. Klass, Elizabeth J. Wilson

Alexandra B. Klass

This Article considers the role of property rights in efforts to transport, inject, and store underground hundreds of million of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year from power plants and other industrial facilities in order to combat dangerous climate change. This technology, known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), could provide deep emission cuts, particularly from coal power generation, on a worldwide basis. In order to implement CCS, private operators and state and federal governments must be able to access hundreds of millions of acres of “pore space” roughly a kilometer below the earth’s surface in which to store …