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Pilot Test Of Storing Carbon Dioxide In Rocks Shows Impressive Outcome (theaustralian.com.au)
For years we have been trying to find different ways to limit carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuels. Some researchers believe that things would be very convenient if we could just deposit carbon dioxide in rocks. A pilot project around this idea has shown an impressive result. John Ross, reporting for the Australian: Scientists say they have demonstrated a foolproof way of sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide -- turning it into rock. An international team of researchers says it has demonstrated for the first time that CO2 can be permanently locked away from the atmosphere by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. The study, reported this morning in the journal Science, could overcome the leakage problems that have plagued attempts to bury CO2 gas underground. Lead author Juerg Matter said between 95 per cent and 98 per cent of the injected CO2 had been mineralised in less than two years, "which is amazingly fast.""Until now it was thought this process would take hundreds to thousands of years," University of Southampton, which led the new study, said in a statement. "The current study has demonstrated that it can take as little as two years."
Then you did it wrong, and missed something.
This is a pilot--first of its kind. It might herald a whole new era for the human race! Or it might not. We'll need many decades of work and repetitions of this study, and studies that grow forth from what we learn here, to know if this is truly a viable technology, or if this study is merely a fluke.
Who did what now?
Store the carbon in something much easier and cheaper. Trees!!!!. You'd think all these smart guys would have thought of this. Wait, you can't get a $2M research grant for planting trees. Guess that answers that question.
>> Scientists say they have demonstrated a foolproof way of sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide -- turning it into rock.
Let me tell you about something called "plants," which are an exotic form of life that use clean solar energy to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. Some people even believe that dead plants can be converted into an equally rare form of sequestered carbon called "coal," though this theory has yet to be proven.
My very first thought was this can be used as part of the Venus terraform
Before we declare victory on the greenhouse gasses issue, what's this gonna cost? There are already several effective solutions to this problem, but nobody seems willing to pay for what they want. Much of that energy is spent feeding and clothing the rapidly growing human population of this planet, and I don't see the poor (surprisingly, one of the beneficiaries of cheap energy) volunteering to stop eating. Just to be clear - all of that cheap industrially grown food actually has a pretty large carbon footprint associated with it. Mechanized farming is what permits us to feed so many (not enough) people; make that more expensive, and those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid will have to give up on that whole surviving thing.
So to ask more directly - what's it gonna cost, and what am I gonna get for it? What percentage of atmospheric CO2 can this reasonably be expected to remove, how quickly, and what's that going to cost those who will actually do it? Oh, and will this kill or save people?
Atmospheric CO2 is about half a percent (400 PPM), though it's rising. Most of these "sequestration" ideas only work if you have high concentrations of CO2 to begin with, so you take the high CO2 concentration from some kind of industrial process and instead of dumping it in the atmosphere, you pump it underground, or in this case into volcanic bedrock. It's not a good way to get existing CO2 levels down. Still, it's a much needed improvement if it works.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Stop clear-cutting all the trees for lumber and to put up crappy strip malls and subdivisions!
That is backwards. A mature forest does not remove net CO2. You need to cut it down, sequester the wood in housing or whatever, and then let the forest regrow. If forests are going to be used to remove carbon, we need to cut down more of them.
Great, if you have a coal power plant sitting on top of bedrock... Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and transporting it to a sequestering facility will most likely be prohibitively expensive.
Our current problem is that we took all the carbon nature put in the ground and released it back into the atmosphere. So finding ways to put it back in the ground kind of makes sense.
As someone who's spent way too much time trying to get trees to grow in Iceland, I have to say: pumping it back underground at Hellisheiði is probably a heck of a lot easier ;)
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
Thank you, person-who-owns-nothing-made-of-wood. Damn all those other people!
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
Let's crunch some numbers.
The largest tree planting project that I know of is the Civilian Conservation Core which planted about 3 billion trees in the US over about a decade (source).
Let's say that a 40-year-old tree is sequestering about 1 ton of CO2 (source, and yes, I realize this will vary a lot based on species and location, but we need to start somewhere).
So, let's say that we magically plant 3 billion trees tomorrow. That will sequester 3e9 trees*2e3 lbs/tree*4.54e-13 lbs/gigatonne / 40 years = 0.068 gigatonnes/year of CO2 sequestered. (Note that ton and tonne are different.) In comparison, the US produces about 1.4 gigatonnes a year (source).
I'm not saying that sequestering CO2 in rock is a better scheme, but planting a few *billion* trees won't solve our problem.
(PS. someone check my math. It's easy to screw these calculations up.)
A negative feedback control works fine as long as you don't mess it up with an additional input...
Sure, because there's no possible way something could ever upset that feedback, say, by causing massive dieoff of plants or something like that, or changing the ocean's properties so it starts sourcing CO2 rather than sinking it. Nope. No way. Never happen.
Believe it or not, you're not the first person to think of feedback loops at work in climate change. There are many known feedback mechanisms (relevant wikipedia article), both negative and _positive_. Let's not pretend that the "Net Primary Productivity" feedback mechanism (what you're talking about) will save us. In fact, it seems to be a pretty weak feedback loop compared to feedback loops that are at work. After all, we're burning up a _lot_ of dead plants (many of them from the days when the earth was covered with jungles). We'd need a lot of new plants to make up for it, and they'd have to show up pretty fast to overpower the other feedback mechanisms. It's easy to see that this feedback loop isn't too strong: just look at the amount of biomass around us and compare it to how much was there 50 years ago. The amount of biomass hasn't changed much even though the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone up an appreciable amount.
These feedback loops are included in climate models. No one pretends that we fully understand them or model them exactly, but people have put a lot of thought into them and have a decent grasp of their workings.
That's nice, glad they found a way to make it work. However, how do you store the CO2 in the meantime? Are all ICE vehicles supposed to carry a compressor and a giant tank around behind them, or a gigantic balloon or something, to trap all the exhaust gasses? The article doesn't say anything about how you're supposed to get the CO2 from vehicles burning fossil fuels (or anything else burning fossil fuels for that matter) to where they inject it underground.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
They can grow on Brawndo. Cos it's got electrolytes.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Lime + carbon dioxide = limestone..
AKA
Ca0 + C02 = CaC03
Crap-load of the stuff lying around already. And, oh golly someone already thought of it.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Stop clear-cutting all the trees for lumber and to put up crappy strip malls and subdivisions!
That is backwards. A mature forest does not remove net CO2. You need to cut it down, sequester the wood in housing or whatever, and then let the forest regrow. If forests are going to be used to remove carbon, we need to cut down more of them.
Well, but old growth forests actually remove more carbon than their younger replacements, so it isn't that simple:
So by leaving an old growth forest in place, we sequester the carbon (in the forest) and improve the uptake.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Also the there is the ability to capture the CO2 right at the source and pipe it directly into the volcanic bedrock. Think pipes to ground vs smokestacks. Or a thing you attach to automotive exhaust pipes that you then have to empty at the gas station while you are refilling your tank. Etc.
There's a very simple reason why carbon dioxide sequestration is a REALLY bad idea.
6 CO2 + 6 H2O + energy C6H12O6 + 6 O2
Running the reaction one way, you have the miracle of photosynthesis. Running it the other way, you have animals (including people) inhaling oxygen and eating food.
Carbon dioxide, far from being a pollutant, is a critically necessary component in food production.
Note also that photosynthesis is Mother Nature's way of recycling carbon dioxide, and "global warming" is the rate control on the reaction: More carbon dioxide, more warmth, longer growing season, more food grown, more CO2 removed from the atmosphere. This is negative feedback control and it is arguably part of why environmental conditions on Earth have been pretty stable for a very long time.
Fascinating! You should really tell a professional climate scientist about your amazing discovery that more CO2 in the atmosphere is a good thing!
You might even be in line for a Nobel Prize or two!!
I stole this Sig
That's actually an EXTREMELY novel approach to sequestration. And likely one of the best I've seen thus far as it becomes about as near to "permanent" sequestration as we're likely to see.
And there's a HELL of a lot of volcanic sites that can be utilized for this sort of thing. So humanity could, conceivably, sequester VAST quantities of surplus carbon this way.
I hope further testing accelerates this project's scheduling and allows it to jump start a full-blown industry...
This way, skeptic or believer, we leave the planet a bit "cleaner" than we found it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How do these groups collect the CO2 in order to have enough to inject into the rocks?
What difference does it make? There is no way we will get 3rd world countries, China and Russia to curb their emissions instead of going for cheap energy anyway, so pumping CO2 into the ground or pushing it into rocks is pretty much all cost and zero benefit for us. It's like trying to stop a hurricane using a household box fan or empty the ocean with a 2 gallon bucket... You will have zero measureable affect on the real issue.
What we should be doing is developing better SOURCES of energy which are cheaper and have less environmental impact. We should be investing heavily in fusion and nuclear research and development not this. Doing this Carbon sequestration stuff is short sighted and largely useless anyway.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Have you succeeded? (I grow house plants, but when I get a new one, I usually apologize to it in advance)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
CO2 will gradually, irrevocably be incorporated into carbonate rocks. Volcanism will naturally decrease do to reduced radiogenic heating. In 1.1Gyr photosynthesis will shut down due to *lack* of CO2, ending life on earth. Ponder that environmental wackos.
In 1.1 Gyr the Sun may have gotten enough hotter to make life as we know it impossible anyway. But if humans haven't managed to establish other outposts out in the Milky Way galaxy by then it probably doesn't matter anyway.
So by leaving an old growth forest in place, we sequester the carbon (in the forest) and improve the uptake.
No you don't, because those old trees die, fall over, and rot. Then the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere.
Double the glacial low. It may have been as high as percent several hundred million years ago. Life can adapt if over hundreds of thousands, but not centuries like now.
So how much energy, i.e. how much oil, gas, and/or coal do we need to burn to provide the energy, to capture, compress, and transport the CO2 in the first place? And can anyone imagine an energy company actually doing this?
Isn't burning fossil fuels releasing fossilized CO2 back into the atmosphere as it was for epochs of time where life thrived on earth rather than introducing an unprecedented life threatening condition upon the earth?
Limited success. Nothing yet that I can confidently point to and say, "yep, that one's definitely going to make it"
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
So, they showed that C)2 can be crystallized in a couple of years instead of thousands of years and the best people can come up with is "maybe this is viable"? How about, maybe the belief about it taking millions or hundreds of millions of years to produce oil and coal is just crap because we now have proof that it doesn't?
Good luck!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's been done before.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
There has been work on the electrolysis of CO2, 2CO2 -> 2C0 +O2, where the CO could easily be used in the Fischer–Tropsch process to make Synfuel .
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Some of the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere. This is circular logic anyway - when you promote reforestation you're talking about sequestering the CO2 in the forest. It's not some scheme to grow wood and then bury it, the forest itself contains the CO2 and as long as the forest remains standing then that CO2 is contained.