An international team of scientists have found a potentially viable way to remove anthropogenic (caused or influenced by humans) carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere -- turn it into rock.
The study, published in
Measures to tackle the problem of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and resultant climate change are numerous. One approach is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), where CO2
Until now it was thought that this process would take several hundreds to thousands of years and is therefore not a practical option. But the current study -- led by Columbia University, University of Iceland, University of Toulouse and Reykjavik Energy -- has demonstrated that it can take as little as two years.
Lead author Dr Juerg Matter, Associate Professor in Geoengineering at the University of Southampton, says: "Our results show that between 95 and 98 per cent of the injected CO2
The gas was injected into a deep well at the study site in Iceland. As a volcanic island, Iceland is made up of 90 per cent basalt, a rock rich in elements such as calcium, magnesium and iron that are required for carbon mineralisation. The CO2
"Carbonate minerals do not leak out of the ground, thus our newly developed method results in permanent and environmentally friendly storage of CO2emissions," says Dr Matter, who is also a member of the University's Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute and Adjunct Senior Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Columbia University. "On the other hand, basalt is one of the most common rock type on Earth, potentially providing one of the largest CO2
To monitor what was happening underground, the team also injected 'tracers', chemical compounds that literally trace the transport path and reactivity of the CO2. There were eight monitoring wells at the study site, where they could test how the chemical composition of the water had changed. The researchers discovered that by the time the groundwater had migrated to the monitoring wells, the concentration of the tracers -- and therefore the CO2
"Storing CO2
"The overall scale of our study was relatively small. So, the obvious next step for CarbFix is to upscale CO2
The investigation is part of the CarbFix project, a European Commission and U.S. Department of Energy funded programme to develop ways to store anthropogenic CO2
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