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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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:07AM
So, how much energy does it require to put all this carbon into the ground? How easy would it be to extract it again if we would need it in a far future?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 20 2016, @11:14AM
You can get the CO2 back from the rock by just adding acid.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ellis D. Tripp on Sunday November 20 2016, @04:12PM
But why would we want it back? The useful carbon has already been oxidized, so there is no energy to be had from CO2, which is essentially the "ash" from burning fossil fuels...
"Society is like stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you end up with a lot of scum on the top!"--Edward Abbey
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2016, @04:18PM
I asked the question. I also don't know why we would need it, at this time. But there might be a point in the future (even if it's 10.000 years in the future) that we might have a need for it. Making it completely inaccessible would be a wrong decision.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday November 20 2016, @11:31PM
Carbon is an essential part of plastics and every living thing. Carbon nanotubes and diamond nanothreads are among the materials being considered for building space elevators.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday November 21 2016, @02:35AM
It's material for the Sabatier reaction [wikipedia.org] which can convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane. If you had a cheap and renewable source of electricity, e.g. wind power or solar, you could use any excess electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then convert the hydrogen into methane with the Sabatier reaction, storing the excess energy on days when there are strong winds or very bright sunshine. Then burn the stored methane in a traditional gas-fired plant during lean times when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, and try to capture as much of the carbon dioxide exhaust as possible for further reuse to make more methane when the sun comes out of the clouds again. You might ask why not just use and store the hydrogen directly, but do remember that hydrogen storage and transport is a non-trivial task, and has many unsolved engineering difficulties. Methane storage and transport on the other hand is pretty much a solved problem. I have a cylinder of stored methane in my kitchen that I use as cooking gas. The petroleum industry transports methane around the world all the time. Just about any petrol engine can be readily converted to use methane instead.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday November 20 2016, @12:47PM
The more interesting question is does the process require 24/7 power to run. If not, it can be supplied from excess renewable power that can't be used on the grid, and you can think of it as a kind of electricity storage (dig stuff out of the ground and burn it when solar/wind is low, put stuff back into the ground when you have excess solar/wind). If it needs 24/7 uninterrupted power then it is another datacentre / telco / blast furnace - part of the problem rather than the solution.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday November 21 2016, @12:06AM
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimate said that a 600 MW coal-fired power plant could, with geological carbon sequestration, produce a net 457 MW of electricity. They estimated that the 600 MW capacity could be achieved by consuming 16% more fossil fuel, with a 71% reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. They favour the idea of burning biomass for electricity, combined with geological sequestration, which would, on balance, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
https://www.bioenergykdf.net/system/files/Net%20Energy...Life%20Cycle%20Approach.pdf [bioenergykdf.net] (the "..." is part of the URL)
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Monday November 21 2016, @12:44AM
The study in question demonstrates that gaseous carbon dioxide can be stored away in basalt. Gaseous carbon dioxide is fairly useless and easy to create anyway (burning any organic material would probably achieve this), so it probably is not a major issue.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Monday November 21 2016, @12:46AM
Correction: the process uses liquid CO2, not gaseous, although it is probably trivial to convert from one to another (though I am not sure myself). But that may mean that the process requires more energy than I would have thought originally.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday November 21 2016, @02:57PM
I'd bet the work required to inject it creates, if one backtracks it completely, about double the CO2 of what's being stored.
In any event, higher CO2 is a good thing, not a problem. Because it's what plants live on, it greens the Earth and improves crop yields thus reducing hunger and poverty, and per the un-massaged data, has zilch to do with global warming.
This is worth a watch no matter which side you're on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LkMweOVOOI [youtube.com]
(Ranker is perhaps being dense on purpose, given that he's a radical environmentalist.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.