Global Warming scientists turning carbon dioxide into ‘harmless’ stone
Researchers have reportedly developed a way to capture and store carbon dioxide by turning it into stone. Their paper was published this week in the journal Science and makes scientists hopeful that they could provide a safer, faster way to harness CO2 and “limit global warming.”
Scientists have viewed “carbon capture and sequester, or CCS,” as a potentially significant way to combat climate change. The premise is that storing CO2 emissions underground would prevent the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere, but previous efforts have made little progress. Most experiments involve pumping CO2 into sandstone or deep aquifers, but the gas will ultimately escape anther way.
photo/ Michael Jarmoluk via pixabay
Now researchers are dissolving CO2 with water and pumping the mixture into volcanic rocks called basalts. Once that happens, the CO2 turns into a solid mineral (calcite), which can then be stored.
Researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other institutions tested this approach as part of a pilot program called the CarbFix project, which launched in 2012 at the Hellisheidi power plant in Iceland.
Previous studies suggested that it would take hundreds or even thousands of years for the calcite to form, but the researchers’ technique worked much faster.
In 2012, they injected 250 tons of CO2 (mixed with water and hydrogen sulfide) into basalt about 1,500 feet below ground. Within two years, 95 percent of the carbon injected into the basalt below the plant had solidified into stone.
“This means that we can pump down large amounts of CO2 and store it in a very safe way over a very short period of time,” Martin Stute, a hydrologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a coauthor of this week’s study, said in a statement. “In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt — and there are many such places.”
It’s not yet clear whether this approach could be viable on a large scale.
The process requires a significant amount of water — 25 tons for every ton of CO2 — and some question whether it could be easily applied to other parts of the world.
Check out the paper, read the abstract etc…click HERE
