State reveals plans for geologic storage facility

Cindy Adams Dunn, secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), recently revealed plans for a $6 million carbon capture, utilization, and storage research and storage facility.

The facility will store the department’s collection of subsurface core samples and drill cuttings.

Core samples are long narrow pieces of rock obtained by drilling that reveal the physical and chemical nature of the rock. They are used in research into the use of subsurface geology.

“As we collectively work on ways to address a changing climate, it’s important to have the best tools and scientific information at hand to inform those efforts,” Dunn said. “The samples available to the public through our Geological Survey are important to a broad range of research by universities, government agencies, and energy companies, so these improvements to our library will help advance carbon capture as well as many other research and decisions that rely on an understanding of geology.”

DCNR’s Geological Survey has a collection of rock core and drill cuttings from oil and gas-bearing and other formations statewide, donated samples, and those collected by survey geologists.

The collection is currently housed at the Pennsylvania Geological Survey headquarters in Middletown, but the building is running out of storage space.