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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: 1) by khallow on Monday November 21 2016, @06:02PM
A 10% increase is probably doable, but how long will it take to plant 300+ billion trees (not all will survive), and where will you plant them?
Which is a fine point. But we need to keep in mind that IF we have space for them, it's just not that hard to plant that many trees with a reasonable factor of excess to cover the ones that don't survive. I think you could get all those trees planted inside of five years.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday November 22 2016, @09:07AM
Assuming 600 trees per acre - https://www.state.sc.us/forest/nurspa.htm [state.sc.us] you'd need 2 million square km. That's a bit more than the entire land area of Mexico. Just getting/preparing that amount of land could take a while and a lot of money. I'm sure we have that much spare space in the whole world but it might take longer than 5 years to just to get that land and projects started. You wouldn't need all of it at once but you'd still need to acquire and prepare it at a high rate if you actually want to do it within 5 years. You'd need about 80000 additional tree planters assuming each person can do about 15000 seedlings per week.
FWIW the Gobi Desert is "only" 1.3 million square km. Imagine all the environmentalists protesting if China somehow managed to destroy the entire desert with trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wall_of_China#Measuring_success [wikipedia.org]
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35496350 [bbc.com]
Note that that is a closer to a 70 year project than a 5 year one. So if it's going to be a 300 year project we'd probably have burned up most of the cheaper oil and would be locked in to the consequences for decades by then.