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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @09:58PM
Apparently there is just one company ("US Magnesium") remaining in North America producing "primary" magnesium (that is material which is not recovered from existing products). They actually do extract it from water from the Great Salt Lake in Utah (which has a much higher concentration of magnesium than seawater, about 5 parts per thousand) using an electrolytic process.
Unfortunately the US government's annual reports [usgs.gov] do not disclose the US production amounts. It was about 10% of global production in 2008 but China's production has roughly quadrupled since then, and the US production is probably proportionally less.
I can't find a good figure of the total energy usage of the process used but I expect it is quite large as it involves very high temperatures and evaporation of large amounts of water. Apparently they have 300km² of evaporation ponds [usu.edu] which apparently represents the world's single largest industrial use of solar energy (well, at least when that was written a decade ago). Neat eh?