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."

Comments

Seems Promising, but Let's Not Get Too Excited

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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.

Re:Seems Promising, but Let's Not Get Too Excited

[Robotbeat]

I'm all for replications, HOWEVER: This isn't psychology or medicine. If a single, transparent, well-documented study shows that volcanic rock (of a common and well-characterized type) quickly locks up CO2, then it's not a fluke.

Science works differently in different fields because some things are easier to fundamentally understand, even with a sample size of n=1, than others where fundamental understanding is basically non-existent (i.e. we don't actually know how the mind works on a fundamental level) and you have effects so small (with so many confounding factors) that you need n=1000 to have any hope at statistical significance.

Cars?

[Anonymous Coward]

My very first thought was this can be used as part of the Venus terraform

How to collect "atmospheric" CO2?

[RobinH]

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.

Re:How to collect "atmospheric" CO2?

[Solandri]

CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere for about $160/ton.

Gasoline emits 8.887 kg of CO2 per gallon of gasoline, so that's 112.5 gallons of gasoline for one ton of CO2. At current prices, that's about $225 worth of gasoline, so this process is "worth it" in terms of recapturing CO2 produced by burning gasoline (basically stick a $1.42/gal tax on gasoline to pay for it).

Electricity generation results in 0.703 kg of CO2 per kWh (same EPA source), so that's 1422 kWh per ton of CO2. At a U.S. average of $0.115/kWh, that's $163.50 worth of electricity. So it would basically double the average price of electricity in the U.S. Still doable, although the similarity of the price means this is getting close to the break-even point where the energy cost to recapture the CO2 approaches the energy gained by producing it (by burning fuel) in the first place.

Cost of sequestration would have to be added on top of this though.

Re:An alternative?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Let me tell you about "plants"

[amorsen]

It is even so convenient that said coal is already stored safely in the ground, so the only thing humanity has to do is, tada, not dig it up.

Alas, something so sensible seems to be entirely beyond us.

Re:If it was that easy and worked that well

[ShanghaiBill]

Then you did it wrong, and missed something.

This process is expensive and there are better ways to do it. CO2 can be used for enhanced oil recovery which can sequester carbon while also helping improve yield. Since it has positive economic value, it is much more likely to actually happen.

Re:If it was that easy and worked that well

[luis_a_espinal]

Then you did it wrong, and missed something.

This process is expensive and there are better ways to do it. CO2 can be used for enhanced oil recovery which can sequester carbon while also helping improve yield. Since it has positive economic value, it is much more likely to actually happen.

Technologies and solutions are not mutually exclusive. And operating costs tend to decrease with scale or better technology. If the only reason to deter use of a technology is the up-front operational cost of a pilot program, we wouldn't have a lot of the shit we take for granted nowadays.

Re:Just plant more trees!

[ceoyoyo]

You can't just plant trees, you have to harvest them when they're grown up and sequester them. Otherwise you'll just run out of land. People don't really like the idea of cutting down forests and burying or sinking the wood into the ocean.

We'd have a nice little carbon sequestration economy going if we made it illegal to recycle paper or wood products.

Re:If it was that easy and worked that well

[Rei]

No, it means that it was a pilot project and it's the first time they've tried this.

It's great news. I've been following as they've been working on this project. Most people wouldn't think we'd have much carbon dioxide here since virtually all of our power is either hydroelectric or geothermal, but we're actually abnormally high emitters per capita. Now, most of that's not easy to capture - we can pretty much rule out the fishing fleet, and two of the three aluminum smelters aren't that close to a geothermal plant (although I don't know if their technique needs to be directly coordinated with a geothermal plant or not). However, geothermal wells also can have surprising levels of CO2 emissions. They're quite varied, and generally far less than burning fossil fuels for power, but some of the worst wells can actually get up to a good fraction of the emissions of of an equivalent amount of fossil fuel power. So this experiment was conducted at Hellisheiði, which is the biggest geothermal plant in Iceland (and one of the biggest in the world), with the goal of making it eventually fully close-cycle. Maybe they'll also reduce their H2S emissions at the same time.

Concerning one thing in the article:

But Dr Matter said there was a risk of mobilising trace metals, potentially polluting downstream waterways. And any injection of water or CO2 into deep subsurface reservoirs carried the danger of “micro” earthquakes.

They're already making regular earthquakes on the production end, so what's the big difference? More to the point, who would even notice? Wow, gee, earthquakes in Iceland, we've never gotten those before ;)

I also don't have much concerns about trace metals flowing into waters. Those are geothermal layers. Any waters there are geothermal waters. Which means that they're pretty "contaminated" to begin with. You don't drink geothermal waters, or anything that they flow into. I have a lot more concerns about 1) agricultural / livestock / septic system contamination, and 2) suspended particulate (aka surface water contamination). See Mývatn for the effects of both, Lagarfljót particularly for the latter. Our main areas of concern with bodies of water have generally been with either clouding them or causing algal blooms.

Then again, though, why should we even bother helping reduce CO2 levels? Make Iceland Covered With Redwoods Again! ;)

One of many feedback mechanisms

[dlenmn]

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.

Re:Let me tell you about "plants"

[Cajun Hell]

Let me get this straight: you burn hydrocarbons for energy. Then you take the waste products, add back the same amount of energy, and it all turns back into hydrocarbons. Repeat. Problem solved: we finally have a perpetual motion machine, thanks to the magic of your "plants."

The problem is that your proposed "plant" cells use something called photosynthesis, whereas what we really need are cells that do petrolsynthesis or coalsynthesis, because solar power is too unreliable or something (if solar power were any good then we wouldn't need to burn these "plants" or their fossil remains). So, genetic engineers, get on that!

Re:An alternative?

[hawkfish]

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:

"Rather than slowing down or ceasing growth and carbon uptake, as we previously assumed, most of the oldest trees in forests around the world actually grow faster, taking up more carbon," said Richard Condit, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year."

So by leaving an old growth forest in place, we sequester the carbon (in the forest) and improve the uptake.

Re:Let me tell you about "plants"

[budgenator]

Why does nobody know this? Biochar

Because Public Education is better at teaching people to drink the kool-aid, than it is at teaching them to find out what's in the kool-aid first.