Varying views yesterday from an environmentalist, physicist and geologist, on Prime Minister’s Patrick Manning’s controversial plan to capture and store carbon emissions to reduce global warming.

Manning said on Sunday the State would use carbon sequestration to reduce the country’s carbon footprint - which per capita is one of the largest in the world.

His statement came during a media conference after the final session of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Port of Spain.

Carbon sequestration is a geo-engineering technique for the long term storage of carbon dioxide and other forms of carbon.

The carbon can be stored in empty underground oil and gas wells.

Physicist Dr Peter Vine said although the method should work in theory the amount of the gas that can actually be stored in the ground successfully has not yet been proven.

Vine, who will speak today at a seminar and public discussion on the impact of land use practices for carbon sequestration, said countries with a big land area have used biological (sequestration) methods.

He said, ’Trinidad and Tobago is too small to use that method so we will have to use the industrial method. But it has not really been proven how much you can pump in and have it stay’.

Environmentalist and University of the West Indies lecturer Dr Wayne Kublalsingh described Manning’s plan as fantasy.

’The State has not spent a single copper cent on any research and development in respect to carbon sequestration.’

He said none of the scientists who have researched carbon sequestration have come up with any viable solution to the problem.

’So carbon sequestration as far as the (Alutrint aluminium) smelter in La Brea is concerned and the proposed steel mill in Claxton Bay is concerned, is a pie in the sky dream by Manning.’

But geologist Dr Krishna Persad said that while the plan would be a costly venture it could be economically viable.

Persad, the Chief Executive Officer of KPA and Associates said: ’It can and will work. It was initiated by Texaco in the 1970’s as a pilot project which Petrotrin continued using as a pilot project up until a few years ago when it was discontinued.’