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Earth News Science Technology

Scientists In Iceland Turn CO2 Into Stone (theguardian.com) 126

Posted by BeauHD from the turned-to-stone dept.
New submitter Zmobie quotes a report from The Guardian: [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. One of the downsides for the project is that it requires 25 tons of water for each ton of CO2 buried. However, seawater can be used. The Iceland Project (also referred to as the CarbFix Project) is already being upscaled to bury 10,000 tons of CO2 each year, in addition to the hydrogen sulphide which also turns into minerals.
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Scientists In Iceland Turn CO2 Into Stone More

Scientists In Iceland Turn CO2 Into Stone

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  • Again? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wow. They did it just yesterday too.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Perhaps the /. mods are a little too 'stoned'.

    • Re: Again? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They showed it a picture of Hillary.

  • Trying to thwart the next Ice Age!

    No, wait, I think I got that backwards! They are trying to prevent becoming Texas!

  • Seawater or any salt water? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slashcross ( 4471571 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @10:05PM (#52293081)
    The summary says "One of the downsides for the project is that it requires 25 tons of water for each ton of CO2 buried. However, seawater can be used." Can any old seawater be used? Would you be able to use the water that gets pumped to the surface with crude oil work? It would be helpful if you could put that back into the ground along with the CO2.

    • Not only would we be sequestering carbon, but we would also be sequestering the extra water we seem to be getting right now.

    • That sounds great, kill 3 birds with one stone. Sea level rise offset by building islands/mountains out of seawater, store the co2, and possibly use the waste from oil production.

    • Any water, salt or no.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is actually a VERY good question.

      If you could dump all kinds of waste water (eg oilsands ponds, fracking water, non-toxic mining waste) along with carbon into the volcano, does it produce a usable material, or is the material produced just another kind of toxic sludge?

      Iceland isn't the only place this can be done, anywhere along the pacific coast would be viable since those are all volcanic areas.

      What would be very cool is if it creates a kind of limestone that could be then re-mined and used for cemen

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dillee1 ( 741792 )

        >Iceland isn't the only place this can be done, anywhere along the pacific coast would be viable since those are all volcanic areas.

        No. TFS stated that it need mafic rock(basalt) to sequester CO2. Mafic lava occurs in hotspot volcano and mid ocean ridge.

        Common volcano spew felsic lava. They are acidic and won't work for this purpose.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nadaou ( 535365 )

      Oil and gas are pumped from sedimentary rock. Basalt is hard dense igneous rock. You don't squeeze oil from volcanic soil. The "fossil" part of fossil fuels is somewhat literal.

      How much energy does it take to drill enough 800m drill holes through basalt to sequester a meaningful amount of CO2? How many drill holes would be needed?

      • How many drill holes would be needed?

        Until it is full...

      • How much energy does the entire process take? This is only cost effective if the total cost of the solution is small compared to the value of the oil/coal burned in the first place.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          How much energy does the entire process take? This is only cost effective if the total cost of the solution is small compared to the value of the oil/coal burned in the first place.

          I guess they could argue not if they use renewable energy.
          Then again if that one was exported or used up rather than fossil energy that would had been one (better?) solution.
          For a country (rather system since this could be a global matter) which mostly / only use fossil fuel then that's an interesting question of course.

      • Maybe hard from a Mohs/vickers perspective, but in practice it's usually highly fractured and easy to erode. This is most visible in the dikes that, being harder, get left behind.

      • Oh, and concerning fossil fuels, we have coal onshore and oil offshore

  • Dupe? [slashdot.org].

  • Ever since our newest Slashdot Overlords (Whipslash et al.) took over, things have been improving. With today's dupe, however, this is the day it really, really feels like home.

    On topic: This is a story I'm OK with reading twice, because even though it's in the early stages, it shows promise for our ability to use science and technology to overcome the damage our tech-fueled overconsumption has caused during the past two centuries. (And I'm using "tech" here in a broad sense of the term to cover many tec

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • It's not as simple as you portray. If it was, we would have already switched to all renewables but that isn't happening.

      But I guess my biggest question is why would investors be needing to make a decision at all? If this is a sound process, why wouldn't government be doing it with a small tax across the economy and byproducts paying for it? Government would also have the abilities to isolate itself from any liability if 40 years from now it turns out to be a mess. But they also have the abilities to negotia

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • The majority of divestment from fossil fuel stock is a political statement not a financial decision. At least the stuff I know about are outside of the higher sulfur coal from the Appalachian regions. And that is caused more from political manipulation than anything.

          Oil is not the boom it used to be but that is thanks to fracking and shale (think scietific advancements) and the increasing supply of natural gas. But the boom was largely political manipulation in the first place with opec limiting production

  • Ancient process (sort of) (Score:3)

    by joaommp ( 685612 ) on Friday June 10, 2016 @11:05PM (#52293313) Homepage Journal

    This process is not completely new. A process related (or actually this one) was used by the ancient romans to produce a type of concrete that severely outlasts current commercially available concrete. That recipe was thought lost, but recently someone managed to replicate it. It used see water, high quantities of carbon and volcanic rock/ash. It is good that new uses have been found for the process or to similar processes.

    • Re:Ancient process (sort of) (Score:5, Funny)

      by ishmaelflood ( 643277 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @12:54AM (#52293577)

      You are creating a non existent puzzle. The 'secret ' of Pozzolan concrete is well described in Wiki. Most Mediterranean cultures had it. Sorry to burst your pathetically small bubble.

    • To add to what Ishmaelflood says, the process was well described in Roman times in military manuals. These were manuals - i.e. instruction books - designed to give the officers reading the instructions no excuse for getting it wrong. You may be familiar with the instruction to "RTFM" - well centurions got the same.

      What wasn't in the manuals - because "everyone knows that" is what the materials needed were. That got lost, as the Roman concrete industry collapsed around about 500-600 CE.

      However a combinatio

    • Oh, and incidentally, the CCS chemistry that they're trialling in Iceland has almost nothing to do with hydraulic cement. The rocks involved are at far ends of the normal range of igneous rocks.
  • I've read a greek myth about origins of this technology.. It was all about the bad breath of Medusa...
  • From a population of 400,000 people, what they did is a notable achievement.

    • From a population of 400,000 people, what they did is a notable achievement.

      What is notable, is that 400,000 people live there at all. Iceland is not the most hospitable of environments to live. Yes, beautiful landscapes, nice toasty hot springs baths . . . but humans also need other basic things, like food and shelter in order to survive.

      I believe that the Icelanders survived there through a combination of two things: Intelligence and Cooperation. When confronted with problems . . . the best thing humans can do, is to use their minds. We don't have hard shells, or poisonous

      • Re: Scientists in Iceland (Score:4, Funny)

        by whopis ( 465819 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @09:24AM (#52294539)

        So are you saying that Iceland is effectively a Beowulf cluster of people?

        Because that's oddly appropriate in a number of ways.

      • 400k is generous, it's closer to 330k. And for most of Iceland's history it was closer to 60k.

        The earlier carrying capacity was based primarily on livestock. Some increase was made possible with cold-weather caloric crops like potatoes, but especially with sea fishing. Today's big increase is made possible by imports.

        Re: housing, though most of Iceland's history, it was turf houses. There are still a good number of people alive today who grew up in them. Today's housing is primarily concrete. You impo

      • Iceland is no different than plenty of other places of the world. E.g. New Found Land or Scotland.
        Despite their northern latitude they not even have a decent winter, due to the gulf stream.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          The Gulf Stream does not reach Iceland. The tail end of the North Atlantic Drift and the Irminger current bound us.

          Our winters are fairly mild compared to our latitude, although certainly colder than Scotland, we're significantly further north in the same basin. Winter lows are generally what you might find in the mid to upper US great plains or northern New England. But winters are very long here, and very windy [wordpress.com].

  • This kind of chemically reactive rock is necessary to capture CO2. The Iceland proejct used basalt which is mainly just available in Hawaii and southernmost California. Other fresh volcanic rock available in the Cascades and western US may wotk too. But most power plants are not currently colocated there. This would be an issue in Cina and India, the other two largest CO2 producers.

  • Like I said when this was posted previously this week...

    This is the wrong thing to be investing in. All this carbon sequestration technology is pretty much pointless unless you can make it cost neutral on an industrial scale. It this processes costs money, even a little, the production of CO2 will NOT abate world wide. The likes of China, Russia and the Third World will simply choose the cheapest form of energy production and laugh at the western world for unilaterally deciding to only use more expensive

    • Apart from that, it is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The problem is that the equilibrium of the reaction

      C + O2 <=> CO2

      has moved too far to the CO2 part. If you store the CO2, the reaction does not change and effectively you are storing oxygen and carbon. This is exactly what happened in the Biosphere II experiment, where the concrete of the buildings took so much CO2 out of the air that the people had not enough oxygen left to breathe.

  • 600 Americans emit 10,000 tons of CO2 per year (Score:3)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Saturday June 11, 2016 @11:39AM (#52294959)
    If the "upscaled" project sequesters 10,000 tons of CO2 every 2 years, that offsets the emissions of about 300 Americans. But there are lots more of us, and we're not even the biggest polluters. This will only start making a noticeable difference if it could be scaled up further, by a factor of one million.

  • If it only took 2 years to turn into stone, then maybe the Earth really IS only 6000 years old!

  • How much energy is needed?

  • EVERYTHING freezes up there. Where's the news?

  • AP, Earth. It has been discovered that plants take in CO2 and create O2 as a waste product.

  • You know wouldn't it be so much more efficient if we just planted trees?

    They breathe in this co2 stuff and put out air, as well as lower the temperature wherever they are.

    Then the govt can buy the carbon credits from people that have more than 5 trees on their property, so much $$ per tree.

    Tell me, where do you go to buy carbon credits? Who generates those now?

  • Plant more TREES

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