For the purposes of carbon capture and storage, carbon mineralization is “just enhancing a process that happens naturally in many parts of the world,” Sanchez-Roa said. Carbon mineralization experiments focus on ultramafic, olivine-rich materials like basalt and dunite, which are found in land-based and seafloor deposits. Olivine minerals, which are common in igneous rocks, are very good at doing this. To store carbon, a rock’s geochemistry has to be able to take the carbon from CO 2 molecules and turn it into a mineral. Sanchez-Roa presented these results at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2021 in December. The cracking extended the duration of the reaction and enhanced the rock’s carbon storage capacity. After an initial period in which mineralization clogged things up as expected, the mineralization created new fractures in the rock that exposed more reactive surface. In new laboratory experiments, Sanchez-Roa tested how the permeability of dunite changed during a month of carbon mineralization. Eventually, water can’t reach new surface areas to react with. The carbonized water has to seep into the stone, but the mineralization process tends to clog up the pathways and reduce a rock’s permeability. The downside? Storage capacity is limited. This process occurs all the time in nature and stores carbon within solid minerals for hundreds or thousands of years with little risk that it will escape back into the atmosphere. With mineral carbon storage, CO 2 dissolved in water chemically reacts with rocks to form new minerals with the carbon. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday. “But with carbon mineralization, you it as a mineral, as a solid, and then it’s very stably stored for a really long period of time.”Ĭracking extended the duration of the reaction and enhanced the rock’s carbon storage capacity. It is always going to be looking for a way to escape to an area where the pressure is lower,” explained Catalina Sanchez-Roa, an experimental geophysicist at Columbia University Climate School in New York City. “When you inject CO 2 in a gas form, it can escape, for example, if a fault is moving or there is damage to the reservoir. Many carbon capture and storage methods seek to trap gaseous or water-dissolved CO 2 in underground storage reservoirs, but these could leak and release greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere. As concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) continue to rise and drive climate change, scientists have been researching options not just to reduce CO 2 emissions but also to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere.
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