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This Lab-Made Mineral Just Became a Key Candidate For Reducing CO2 in The Atmosphere
Scientists just worked out a way of rapidly producing a mineral capable of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) - giving us a potentially exciting option for dealing with our increasingly overcooked planet. Magnesite, which is a type of magnesium carbonate, forms when magnesium combines with carbonic acid - CO2 dissolved in water. If we can produce this mineral at a massive scale, it could safely store large amounts of carbon dioxide we simply don't need in our planet's atmosphere.
[...] Being able to make the mineral in the lab could be a major step forward in terms of how effective carbon sequestration might eventually be. "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude," says [Ian] Power. "This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient."
[...] With a tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite able to capture around half a tonne of CO2, we're going to need a lot of magnesite, and somewhere to put it all as well. As with other carbon capture processes, it's not yet clear whether this will successfully scale up as much as it needs to. That said, these new discoveries mean lab-made magnesite could one day be helpful – it puts the mineral on the table as an option for further investigation.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @02:24PM (3 children)
Sorry, you're not even going to make the slightest dent in atmospheric CO₂ levels with these kind of quantities.
A typical human breathes out about 1kg of CO₂ per day, which is about half a tonne per year. That's your carbon footprint just by being alive. (If you also include other aspects of a person's carbon footprint, a typical westerner is about 30–40 times that).
With ~8 billion humans that's ~4 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year, just by those people being alive. So just to counteract the carbon footprint of humans breathing you need to produce 8 billion tonnes of this shit every single year (at increasing quantities year over year), and you need to do it all with zero carbon emissions in your entire production, transportation and storage process.
Sorry, while this might be a cool process for manufacturing magnesite; the application as a solution for atmospheric CO₂ levels sounds like bullshit to me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @02:36PM
To get an idea of how ridiculous this quantity is, it is interesting to compare this number with the global production of magnesium today, which is about 800 thousand tonnes per year!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @02:48PM
I love this tidbit from the article (link is original):
If you follow the link, the actual number in the source article is 40 billion tonnes per year.
But hey, what's a few orders of magnitude between friends?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @06:46PM
Moreover, considering just the carbon and estimating by standard atomic weights, magnesite (MgCO₃) is about one seventh carbon by mass.
Glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆), is a bit less than half carbon by mass. So corn syrup (essentially pure glucose) has about 3 times the carbon content as magnesite for a given mass.
Given that, the photosynthesis reaction seems like a much more effective sequestering process:
6CO₂ + 6H₂O -> C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂
The reason is that less of the (more massive) oxygen remains, and the resulting O₂ is not a greenhouse gas so we don't need to sequester it.