In 1971 Orlo Childs was speaking at the annual Underground Waste Management symposium and posed the following question about the practice of using injection wells to dispose of America’s toxic waste.  “Where will the waste reside 100 years from now?” Orlo Childs at the 1971 conference Underground Waste Management

It has been known for a long time that injection wells are not a permanent solution and that what we blast underground will come back to us. Will it take 100 years? Fifty? One? We don’t know until we try and boy have we tried. And in the case of the oil industry we can see how that is failing in the Permian in Texas. And in Ohio. And across the country where we have more than 180,000 injection wells. I wrote about some of these failures in July.

The thing about the oil industry’s plan to capture carbon and store it underground is that it only works if the storage is permanent. And yet we know that is impossible. When will we learn that blasting carbon dioxide underground is a failed strategy? Earlier this month, actually. The very first carbon storage project has already failed. We tried again, we hoped, we failed.