The Domesday Book, Chapter III

Carbon Dioxide storage is here. Compressing the gas into a supercritical fluid and pumping it underground is the way big oil is working to keep the greenhouse gases at a manageable level. They say there is enough room underground to store decades worth of CO2. Billions of tons. Maybe, if the plan goes big-time, trillions of tons.

But 'underground' doesn't mean the same thing as burying Aunt Mildred. She probably won't come back to haunt us during an earthquake. The first time we have even a small earth impactor, or a serious enough earthquake all of the undissolved gas is going to be ejected to the surface. Here's the problem. We can't breathe it. So when it DOES come out, it will overwhelm (1) every oxygen breathing organism it covers; (2) industry's ability to hide it again, and (3) will cause a sudden and immediate spike in the atmospheric temperature.

Some of it is going to leech in to the water table and turn the water acidic and some is going to push things like uranium and arsenic to the surface, but that's a whole other story.

Burying all that CO2 is like planting a huge asphyxiation bomb and hoping it doesn't go off.