Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Electricity

By using it as heat-transfer fluid, researchers propose using sequestered CO2 to extract geothermal energy.

In computer simulations, a 10-mile-wide system of concentric rings of horizontal wells situated about three miles below ground produced as much as half a gigawatt of electrical power -- an amount comparable to a medium-sized coal-fired power plant -- and more than 10 times bigger than the 38 megawatts produced by the average geothermal plant in the United States.
The simulations also revealed that a plant of this design might sequester as much as 15 million tons of CO₂ per year, which is roughly equivalent to the amount produced by three medium-sized coal-fired power plants in that time.