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posted by on Sunday November 20 2016, @09:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the rock-of-ages dept.

In November, the Paris Climate Agreement goes into effect to reduce global carbon emissions. To achieve the set targets, experts say capturing and storing carbon must be part of the solution. Several projects throughout the world are trying to make that happen. Now, a study on one of those endeavors, reported in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, has found that within two years, carbon dioxide (CO2) injected into basalt transformed into solid rock.

Lab studies on basalt have shown that the rock, which formed from lava millions of years ago and is found throughout the world, can rapidly convert CO2 into stable carbonate minerals. This evidence suggests that if CO2 could be locked into this solid form, it would be stowed away for good, unable to escape into the atmosphere. But what happens in the lab doesn't always reflect what happens in the field. One field project in Iceland injected CO2 pre-dissolved in water into a basalt formation, where it was successfully stored. And starting in 2009, researchers with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Montana-based Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership undertook a pilot project in eastern Washington to inject 1,000 tons of pressurized liquid CO2 into a basalt formation.

After drilling a well in the Columbia River Basalt formation and testing its properties, the team injected CO2 into it in 2013. Core samples were extracted from the well two years later, and Pete McGrail and colleagues confirmed that the CO2 had indeed converted into the carbonate mineral ankerite, as the lab experiments had predicted. And because basalts are widely found in North America and throughout the world, the researchers suggest that the formations could help permanently sequester carbon on a large scale.

Similar results were found in Iceland.

Does injecting CO2 into rock really make more sense than not putting it into the atmosphere in the first place?


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  • (Score: 1) by EETech1 on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:37PM

    by EETech1 (957) on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:37PM (#430163)

    It's crazy to think that a 300-pound barrel of oil can produce 950 pounds of carbon dioxide when burned!

    I had no idea that you produced three times as much carbon dioxide in the exhaust as fuel into the burner.

    Wow...

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday November 20 2016, @11:41PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday November 20 2016, @11:41PM (#430203) Journal

    It's because a carbon atom has a mass of 12 atomic mass units, but an oxygen atom has a mass of ~16 atomic mass units, so in a CO2 molecule most of the mass is due to the oxygen. Most of the mass of petroleum is due to the carbon in it.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by EETech1 on Monday November 21 2016, @03:49PM

      by EETech1 (957) on Monday November 21 2016, @03:49PM (#430573)

      I understand the chemistry involved, i just never thought about it in tons per barrel.

      With a coal plant, seeing tons of carbon dioxide being emitted makes sense, but seeing the numbers for a barrel of oil really surprised me.

      It really drives home the fact that we need to stop burning oil!

      Cheers!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:38AM (#430427)

    It's crazy to think that a 300-pound barrel of oil can produce 950 pounds of carbon dioxide when burned!

    Let's see:

    Oil is mostly hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons, as the name already says, are made of carbon and hydrogen (other than methane which is gaseous and therefore not part of oil) and have at most three hydrogen atom. Let's go to the upper limit and assume three hydrogens per carbon (despite that the average is way below, but then, this may compensate for other substances).

    The mass of an atom is basically determined by the number of nucleons; in forst approximation, each nucleon has the same mass, and we will ignore the mass defect.

    The by far most common carbon isotope has 12 nucleons. Normal hydrogen has only one nucleon. So an upper estimate of the mass of a certain amount of oil is 15 nucleon masses per carbon atom.

    Carbon dioxide is made of carbon and oxygen (the oxygen being taking from the air on burning). In particular, carbon dioxide is CO2, so it's made of 1 carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. A normal oxygen atom has 18 nucleons, therefore the mass of a carbon dioxide molecule is 2×18+12=48 nucleon masses.

    Now when perfectly burning oil, every carbon atom gives one carbon dioxide molecule. So the total mass of carbon dioxide from burning oil is 48 nucleon masses per carbon atom.

    So 15 nucleon masses of oil give 48 nucleon masses of carbon dioxide. That is the mass of carbon dioxide produced by burning the oil is by a factor 48/15 = 3.2 larger than the mass of oil we started with.

    That is, burning 300 pounds of oil gives about 3.2 × 300 pounds= 960 pounds of carbon dioxide.