Pollyea and a team of undergraduate and graduate geology students are breaking new ground every day, trying to find new ways to pump and store large amounts of carbon dioxide, produced primarily by industry, at least two miles below the Earth's surface to reduce its harmful effects on the atmosphere.
“As a scientific question, it was always fascinating to me,” Pollyea said. “I know a lot of the science that we do, we learn things, but it may never be commercialized. There's a reason why we do basic research, because you don't know when these tools and this knowledge will be useful in the future.
“So I just kept doing it, I enjoyed it and I think I got relatively good at modeling the part of it. Then in the last few years we've seen that there's some commercial interest in it.”
Anyone unfamiliar with carbon should know that carbon dioxide can be used in a variety of products – soda, beer, refrigerants, plastics, adhesives, fire extinguishers. But the world produces too much of it, causing the environment to warm.
Scientists like Pollyea are watching the growth of industries around the world, resulting in more carbon dioxide being emitted annually, and worry about the impact on a global population of more than 8 billion people. These impacts also mean that many industries are looking for more environmentally friendly processes.
“There is the cost of doing something, but there is also the cost of not doing something,” Pollyea said. “So how do we figure out which one is more?”