Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumCO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough
The new research pumped CO2 into the volcanic rock under Iceland and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted...
... Matter said the only thing holding back CCS was the lack of action from politicians, such as putting a price on carbon emissions: “The engineering and technology of CCS is ready to be deployed. So why do we not see hundreds of these projects? There is no incentive to do it.”...
... One potential challenge for the new technique is that it requires large amounts of water: 25 tonnes for each tonne of CO2 buried. But Matter said seawater could be used, which would be in plentiful supply at coastal sites. Another is that subterranean microbes might break down carbonate to methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, but this was not seen in the Iceland research...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/09/co2-turned-into-stone-in-iceland-in-climate-change-breakthrough
Research paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312
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Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)Ohioblue22
(1,430 posts)Circumcision or white priviledge
felix_numinous
(5,198 posts)
muriel_volestrangler
(101,294 posts)was needed. It shouldn't be used as an excuse to burn more fossil fuel; but it could be a way of using biofuel and sequestering a net amount of carbon, thus giving a way of reducing atmospheric levels faster than would happen with the natural carbon cycle.
OKIsItJustMe
(19,937 posts)Published: 9 June 2016
[font size=3]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 today in Science, has shown for the first time that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can be permanently and rapidly locked away from the atmosphere, by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. The CO2 reacts with the surrounding rock, forming environmentally benign minerals.
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 is physically removed from the atmosphere and trapped underground. Geoengineers have long explored the possibility of sealing CO2 gas in voids underground, such as in abandoned oil and gas reservoirs, but these are susceptible to leakage. So attention has now turned to the mineralisation of carbon to permanently dispose of CO2.
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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 was mineralised over the period of less than two years, which is amazingly fast.”
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Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)
pscot
(21,024 posts)to round up all that ambient carbon. By the way, there's an active conversation on Reddit earth science with some expert opinion being expressed.
hunter
(38,309 posts)Especially in Iceland, where most homes and businesses are already heated by geothermal energy and electric power is mostly hydroelectric and geothermal.
Plans for Iceland to switch 100% to non-carbon and carbon-neutral energy sources are utterly realistic, especially with improvements in electric transportation systems and synthetic fuels.
Rock that's useful for carbon sequestration might be even more useful in the manufacture of carbon neutral concretes, maybe even concretes that absorb more atmospheric carbon dioxide as they cure than was emitted producing them.
Quitting fossils fuels is like quitting cigarettes. You have to quit buying cigarettes.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)has to be reducing emissions at source. CCS should be seen as supplementary to that, not as enabling continued excessive fossil fuel burning.
Note that Iceland's volcanic geothermal process also stirs up from underground and releases some methane anf CO2, says the OP.
nitpicker
(7,153 posts)
NickB79
(19,233 posts)How much carbon can these rocks absorb per year at max carbon sequestration rates, assuming we go full-bore into exploiting them?
How much carbon can these deposits ultimately hold before they are saturated?
Because bear in mind we're currently emitting something like 30 BILLION tons of carbon per year. Just to halt atmospheric carbon at current levels, we need to scale this technique up to sequester this much carbon annually. To get back down to a safe 350 ppm CO2 before positive feedback loops kick in and make global warming irreversible for tens of thousands of years, we'd need to sequester HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of tons of CO2 per year.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)NickB79
(19,233 posts)At best, we've finally hit a carbon emissions plateau for the past two years (though it's debatable whether this is from real carbon cuts, or just from China's economy slowing down dramatically).
On the other hand, even on this plateau, we've seen atmospheric carbon emissions jumping 4ppm year over year in recent years, an insanely fast amount that means we stand no chance of staying below 2C of warming if it continues. It's now been proposed that the reason we're seeing such a spike is because we've saturated the planet's carbon sinks: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1127100435
If true, that means Mother Earth just bumped up the point of no return with regard to global warming by many years. In the meantime, we're still clinging to IPCC reports and the Paris Accords that assume we have decades to get a handle on this threat.
