Carbon dioxide has been pumped underground and turned rapidly into stone, demonstrating a radical new way to tackle climate change.
The unique project promises a cheaper and more secure way of burying
CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground, where it cannot warm the
planet. Such carbon capture and storage
(CCS) is thought to be essential to halting global warming, but
existing projects store the CO2 as a gas and concerns about costs and
potential leakage have halted some plans.
The new research pumped CO2 into the volcanic rock under Iceland
and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to
form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were
amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years,
compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.
The Iceland project has already been increased in scale to bury
10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and the basalt rocks used are common around
the world, forming the floor of all the oceans and parts of the land
too. “In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in
places where there’s a lot of basalt and there are many such places,”
said Martin Stute, at Columbia University in the US and part of the
research team.
Testing has taken place in the Columbia River Basalts,
extensive deposits in Washington and Oregon in the US. India, which has
many polluting coal power plants, has huge basalt deposits in the Deccan Traps.
One potential challenge for the new technique is that it requires
large amounts of water: 25 tonnes for each tonne of CO2 buried. But
Matter said seawater could be used, which would be in plentiful supply
at coastal sites. Another is that subterranean microbes might break down
carbonate to methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, but this was not seen
in the Iceland research.
The research, called the Carbfix project,
took place at Iceland’s Hellisheidi power plant, the world’s largest
geothermal facility. The plant pumps up volcanically heated water to run
electricity-generating turbines but this also brings up volcanic gases,
including carbon dioxide and nasty-smelling hydrogen sulphide.
The researchers re-injected 230 tonnes of the gas, which was
dissolved in water to prevent it escaping, down into the basalt to a
depth of 400-500m. They used tracer chemicals to show that over 95% of
CO2 was turned into stone within two years, “amazingly fast” according
to Matter. Edda Aradottir, who heads the project for Reykjavik Energy, said: “It was a very welcome surprise.”
The Iceland project has now begun scaling up to bury 10,000 tonnes of
CO2 a year, plus the hydrogen sulphide which also turns into minerals.
The Columbia University group are also investigating another rock type, found in Oman, which may be able to turn CO2 into rock even better than basalt.
In conventional CCS, the CO2 is stored as a gas in sedimentary rocks
such as exhausted oil fields under the North Sea. Unlike basalt, these
rocks lack the minerals needed to convert CO2 into stone. Such
sedimentary reservoirs could potentially leak and therefore have to be
monitored, which adds to costs.
They have also raised concerns from the public and projects on land in the Netherlands and Germany have been halted as a result. “In Europe you can forget about onshore CCS,” said Matter.
Conventional CCS also requires the CO2 to be separated from the mix
of gases emitted by power stations and industrial plants, which is
expensive. But the basalt-based CCS does not require this. However,
Matter said there would still be a role for conventional CCS in places
where power plants are close to good reservoirs.
thanks https://www.theguardian.com
570
No comments:
Post a Comment