It’s a sad day when the country that has long had a stranglehold on manufacturing just about everything you can think of is also the country that is putting out so much CO2 in the atmosphere.

In case there’s any doubt about that, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be evaluating CO2 across the globe when it reaches space.

*UPDATE: Unfortunately, this morning’s lift-off didn’t gain enough altitude for some strange reason:

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit this morning after a 4:55 a.m. EST liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Several minutes into the flight of the Taurus rocket … the payload fairing failed to separate.

A year after MIT’s 2007 study, “The Future of Coal“, Assistant Professor Ruben Juanes and graduate student Michael L. Szulczewski have progressed with the idea of sequestering CO2 from coal-burning power plants and other greenhouse gas contributors by looking at doing it in the real world – on a basin scale.

“Our model is a simple, effective way to calculate how much CO2 a basin can store safely. It is the first to look at large scales and take into account the effects of flow dynamics on the stored CO2,” he said.

By burying the CO2 in naturally deep basins, the idea is that a ‘capillary trapping’ effect will occur, where liquefied CO2 is trapped in underground water – think bubbles of water in oil. The CO2 would dissolve and react with the reservoir rocks to eventually come out as harmless carbonate minerals.