WESTCARB Overview

The West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (known as WESTCARB) is exploring opportunities in seven Western states and one province for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere by enhancing natural processes and by capturing it at industrial facilities before it is emitted and storing it securely underground. Such measures will help slow the atmospheric buildup of this greenhouse gas and its associated climatic effects.

WESTCARB is identifying the major sources of man-made CO₂ in its territory; assessing the status and cost of technologies for separating CO₂ from process and exhaust gases at large industrial plants; determining the potential for storing captured CO₂ in secure geologic formations; quantifying the extent to which changes in the management of forests, rangelands, and agricultural lands could increase carbon storage by plants and soil; and assessing the cost of building pipelines to move CO₂ from the points of capture to the points of storage.

Established in Fall 2003, WESTCARB is one of seven research partnerships co-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to characterize regional carbon sequestration opportunities and conduct technology validation field tests. The California Energy Commission manages WESTCARB and is a major co-funder.

DOE will combine WESTCARB’s findings with those of other partnerships to create an interactive national “carbon atlas” (NATCARB) to better understand how sequestration technology can help the United States and Canada reduce the carbon intensity of their economies and mitigate changes in the climate.