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Earth Science Technology

Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere (phys.org) 307

Posted by BeauHD from the do-able-science dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the rate of formation is very slow. The researchers were able to show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst, magnesite would form within 72 days. The microspheres themselves are unchanged by the production process, so they can ideally be reused. Project leader, Professor Ian Power from Trent University in Ontario added: "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude. This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient. For now, we recognize that this is an experimental process, and will need to be scaled up before we can be sure that magnesite can be used in carbon sequestration (taking CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently storing it as magnesite). This depends on several variables, including the price of carbon and the refinement of the sequestration technology, but we now know that the science makes it do-able."
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Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere More

Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere

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  • Techno Salvation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by js290 ( 697670 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:13AM (#57129818)
    ...is a faith based proposition. Nature already has a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for long term storage: trees. Start planting trees on the monocrop, annual farmlands.

    • Re:Techno Salvation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <`gameboyrmh' `at' `gmail.com'> on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:22AM (#57129872) Journal

      The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.

      • Re:Techno Salvation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:33AM (#57129938)

        The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.

        They would be part of a good long term strategy even if they're not a good short term strategy and not the answer by itself.

        Like most complex problems- the best answer is probably a multi-directional approach.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fedos ( 150319 )
          By the time they'd have an effect, severe permanent damage would have already been done.

          • By the time they'd have an effect, severe permanent damage would have already been done.

            Severe permanent damage has already been done. The sooner we start to work to fix the problem the less damage will ultimately be done.

          • Fallacy of Excluded Middle (Score:5, Insightful)

            by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @12:52PM (#57131554)

            By the time they'd have an effect, severe permanent damage would have already been done.

            This (quite possible) scenario doesn't preclude us from planting more trees, does it?

            I mean, we should be planting more trees as a matter of course in conjunction with other measures to reduce CO emissions (at best) - or regardless of how much we fuck up on that front (at worst.)

            Planting a damned tree actually cost little, specially if one were to pick moderate fast growing hardy species (like Moringa or Gumbo Limbo, depending on the climate.).

            Doesn't even need to be trees, but hedges that can provide either wind barriers or foliage to cattle.

            We don't even need to guarantee that a tree reaches adulthood, we just need green bodies to consume CO2. We could implement a "minnow spawn" approach and throw fast growing tree seeds already prepped to germinate by the millions on rows. Large numbers of disposable seeds would guarantee trees would grow.

        • Re:Techno Salvation (Score:4)

          by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @12:35PM (#57131414)

          True. I can already hear the Fox pundits (and James Inhoff) going on an on about how fossil fuels are now fine - burn away.

          There are other advantages to solar, hydro, wind, battery solutions. And the technology invesment required to build those out is probably comparable to the investment to scale up and deploy a magnesite solution capable of sequestering historical C02 as well as countering new and increasing sources.

          So yes, do both - to repair past damage. But fer Crissake, let's figure out how to make solar cheap and non-polluting instead of pretending we've found a magic bullet that makes it safe to let Koch Industries continue to have their way...

      • Re:Techno Salvation (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Alwin Barni ( 5107629 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @10:20AM (#57130254)

        The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.

        Yes, I agree, the only problem is that whenever I hear about "solutions" by artificial sequestration of CO2 I rarely hear how much CO2 will be produced by manufacturing and deploying these "solutions" or impact on other human activities (e.g. food production in case of distributing reflective substances in upper atmosphere).

        • I agree that SRM just seems like a bad idea from all the research on potential side effects. But we can power the CO2 sequestration infrastructure from renewable energy, so the CO2 cost there can be negligible.

    • Re:Techno Salvation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pr0t0 ( 216378 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:36AM (#57129964)

      I can't tell if this is humor, sarcasm, or trolling.

      But since trees can and will both decay and burn, they are not a long-term solution. Plus it would take so many trees that you would have to destroy most natural ecosystems and farmland for us to plant our way out of the 2-degree rise by 2100 even with really productive plants like poplar trees and switchgrass.

      Tree planting can help some though, particularly in equatorial regions. Like most things, rarely are the solutions simple to very complex problems. A multi-pronged attack with rapid reduction in fossil fuels, in combination with various CO2 sequestration efforts (like biomass) appears to be the quickest, most effective approach at the moment.

      • An interesting area I've heard of deals with aerobic bacteria that decays trees: The theory is oil exists because this carbon producing bacteria didn't used to exist, so carbon was trapped. If that theory is true, you could have some effect by managing tree decay and that bacteria... But without it, the positive effect of trees is reduced.

        Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-

        • Step 1: Instead of storing carbon in trees, we'll store it in large animals.

          Step 2: Kill them all and let the passage of time bury their bodies and turn them into goo.

          Step 3: Find a way to turn the goo into something useful????

          Step 4: Profit

        • Re: Techno Salvation (Score:5, Informative)

          by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @12:36PM (#57131422)

          You're confusing a few things.

          Oil was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, mostly from dead animal and plant life in shallow seas. Trees did not exist yet.

          Around 300 millions years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce a protein called lignin. Lignin is the primary structural component of wood. That allowed those plants to get taller than their neighbors and eventually evolve into trees.

          At the time, there was nothing on the planet that could digest lignin. So, tree dies and falls over and it just sits there. It can't rot because nothing can eat it. And it did not help that the first trees had very shallow root systems, so a lot of them fell over. Eventually the dead trunks get buried by sediment and other tree trunks, get compressed into peat, which then got further buried and heated and compressed into coal.

          It took about 60 million years for bacteria and fungi to appear that could eat lignin. So a whole lot of trees got piled up before any could rot.

          Btw, there are still no animals that can digest lignin. Termites and carpenter ants have a species of fungi in their gut that digests lignin for them.

          Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-made, to drive other processes than heating things up. It's not all about carbon

          It's all about carbon.

          The sunlight hitting a leaf is still an energy input. The sugars made by the tree will be consumed and result in heat. It's similar with the solar panels - the electricity will be used to do something, and that process will release heat.

          The released heat is not 100% of the energy input from sunlight, but 100% of the energy input from sunlight on dirt isn't released as heat either.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        Tree do decay but not all the captured carbon is released back to the atmosphere as a result. Some is permanently captured in the soil that results from the decay.
        This would still not be a very effective means of carbon capture in the short term though.

    • Trees are very inefficient. Photosynthesis only captures a few percent of the Sun's energy. Trees also require space, decent soil, and water, so they compete with agriculture. And unless you bury the trees, that carbon will be released again.

      Mineral capture could be used in deserts and other useless areas.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        Obviously you haven't been to the Cambrian Shield. Here we have trees growing out of exposed bedrock. I don't think that soil would be much use for farming. 8^)

        Trees are actually rather advantageous when it comes to places to grow.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by skids ( 119237 )

      "Techno Salvation" isn't a faith based proposition. It's a last-ditch effort the rational members of any species would attempt in the face of impending catastrophe and intractable public behavior.

      In other words, there's no reason anyone has to believe it will work to try it... just the chance that it might and the lack of confidence in other recourses is enough.

      • I think central idea of a "Techno Salvation" proposition is that technology will save us without our having to do anything to actually address the problem. That's what makes it "faith-based". It's the belief that we can do whatever we want, and eventually someone will invent something that will fix everything for us.

    • I don't think so. When a tree dies, even if it doesn't burn, it releases just about all of the carbon it had trapped as it decomposes. The micro-organisms that effectively eat it as it's rotting put out a lot of CO2. Even untouched forests have a life cycle of trees and other plants growing and dying (due to natural causes like changes in rainfall/temp, insects, disease, competition from other plants, etc.), putting an effective upper limit on how much carbon a forest can keep trapped. Sure some tiny amount

    • It isn't 100% new either. CO2 scrubbers have been used in submarines for a long time. They are also used in rebreathers.

  • And now it's once again time for those who scream "you're anti-science!" to rail against scientific solutions to the sins they religiously flagellate themselves for, when they aren't feeling smugly superior for bringing a bag to grocery store.

    • I agree with your sentiment, but your sentence structure is annoying as fuck to read.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nwaack ( 3482871 )

      And now it's once again time for those who scream "you're anti-science!" to rail against scientific solutions to the sins they religiously flagellate themselves for, when they aren't feeling smugly superior for bringing a bag to grocery store.

      Could you diagram this sentence?

      • That IS one heck of a sentence, isn't it?

        Some people scream "you're anti-science" when someone points out problems with their arguments.

        Some of those same people who scream about "anti-science" seem to get rather upset when scientific solutions are proposed, going quite anti-science themselves.

        It seems perhaps their resistance to scientific / engineering *solutions* may be because:

        a) they have more interest in either flagellating themselves or

        b) feeling smugly superior while they wear their recycled rubber

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      What *I* wonder about is the production of the raw materials that they use to consume the CO2. It the stuff will normally form automatically (even if slowly), then the base material can't exist exposed to air, so they need to do *something* to make it available.

      What are the external costs? I really doubt that it's as smooth and simple as the article would lead you to believe.

  • Might take a while (Score:5, Informative)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:17AM (#57129846)
    So one tonne of this mineral will remove 5 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year. One article I found based on a quick Google search gives an estimate of about 1,100 tonnes of CO2 emitted every second. Perhaps some of this could be captured more easily where it's being generated, but we'd need to manufacture a lot of this stuff if we wanted to be carbon neutral with just this technology alone.

    • Re:Might take a while (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:34AM (#57129948)

      So one tonne of this mineral will remove 5 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year.

      I'm assuming that you missed the decimal point. One tonne of it will remove 1/2 or .5 tonnes of CO2. Which is still impressive.

      I didn't RTFA, but I'm wondering if the mineral can be used for some sort of construction. As you stated, it's going to take an awful of it to be effective, and it would seem to be silly if we're just going to have to pile it up somewhere. I'm wondering if it could be used as a building material, or insulation. If not perhaps we can build a gigantic statue of Bender,Or a mount Everest sized pyramid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      Not per year, but once. The CO2 is sequestered during the making of the mineral, which is MgCO3. The making of this mineral (which the report claims to have accelerated at room temperature, thus with limited requirement of energy input) is a one-time effort. Then, to sequester more CO2, you have to make more mineral.

      It's the polystyrene microspheres that are the interesting part, because they can be reused. The article does not say how you go about separating the polystyrene from the magnesite, though,

      • They also don't explain where they will get all the Mg from.

        • The last two sentences of the article explain it, but very obscurely. There are talking about reacting ultramafic rock (which contains MgO, but the article does not say that) with the CO2.

          As to the question of how the polystyrene is separated from the magnesite, the process would probably be one of grinding up rock then churning it with an aerated suspension of the spheres, and the magnesite would settle out. Washing and skimming would separate them. The density of polystyrene is about that of water, and by

      • The cost per metric ton of mg is around $4,600, total emissions are around 9.7 billion tons per year, with each metric ton of mg sequestering half a ton of CO2. So we would need 19.4 billion tons of mg per year yet we mine only 1.1ish million metric tons of magnesium. Making the mineral curb a significant amount of emissions is obviously infeasible unless we up our mining of mg 18 thousand times and spend 5x the GDP of the USA per year. Further it's not obvious how much natural mineral is easily mined in
    • It's actually worse, 1 ton of magnesite can sequester 1/2 ton of CO2, we are releasing 1200 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere EVERY SECOND of every day. I also question how much CO2 is created in making the magnesite, considering that it's sped up formation is due to polystyrene microspheres, which are in themselves a petroleum product. I imagine that to even make a dent, we'd have to be forming millions of tons of this stuff every day, and that's just not feasible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        Yeah, the uses of the end-product don't seem to fill enough potential market areas for this to piggyback on existing industry either... how much "floor binding material" could we possibly need.

        I'm waiting for some crazed corporate shill to point to this study and say "microplastics are saving the planet"

    • Sequestration is only being explored because we don't want to pay the energy price to break apart the carbon dioxide. The entire reason fossil fuels are such a tempting energy source is that their CO2 and H2O end products sit at very low energy states, meaning burning the fuel to produce CO2 and H2O gives off a lot of energy. But if you're willing to dump enough energy into CO2, you can simply break it apart [wikipedia.org] into oxygen gas and some other carbon compound.

      Obviously it doesn't make sense to do this with

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      If I read the summary correctly, that's not amount removed per year, that's total amount removed. The CO2 reacts with the material to form a new material. The polystyrene beads can hopefully be recycled. The resultant material one might call ash or precipitate (I'm not clear on the reaction process) is not reusable in the reaction. The initial ingredients are consumed by the reaction, and the polystyrene beads are a catalyst (and hopefully reusable).

      So it's vitally important that the consumed ingredient

  • Take a lesson. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Whetherthis works or something as-yet-invented works, THIS is how potentially significant problems are solved. From the population bomb to the threat of mass starvation, it has never been social engineering, but real engineering which has made a positive difference.

    https://www.amazon.com/Bet-Ehrlich-Julian-Gamble-Earths/dp/0300198973/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1534338700&sr=8-6&keywords=the+bet

    https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/paul-ehrlich-was-wrong-julian-simon-was-right-and-won-the-bet

    • Actually, it's a combination of both. From the outcry and outrage about predicted environmental disasters came legislation such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. It's also extremely unlikely that it's a coincidence that the EPA was created shortly afterwards. Were a bunch of the predictions from this time wrong? Sure. But it's likely we would be considerably closer to those disasters without this 'social engineering' influencing policy to consider the effect we

  • Or are growing trees and farming shellfish things that are too workable and don't require large grants to over long periods of time ?

  • Include magnesium in the energy balance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shayd2 ( 1689926 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:23AM (#57129880)
    Just where do they propose to get the magnesium? At what energy cost?

  • Thus countering... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:25AM (#57129892)

    "...thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2..." which is negligible compared to the warming effect of Methane, and even more negligible compared to the warming effect of water vapor.

    Find a way to rapidly remove water vapor from the atmosphere and you may finally be onto something. The greenhouse effect of water vapor is 10,000 times stronger than the greenhouse effect of CO2, at current levels for each. Reducing water vapor by 1% would have 100 times the effect of removing ALL of the CO2 from the atmosphere (which is not to say we shouldn't try to remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere, because that would still be something).

    A large industrial chiller hooked up to a nuclear power plant could drain literally hundreds of tons per day of water vapor from the atmosphere. At that rate it would take perhaps just a few years to remove 1% of the water vapor from the atmosphere, with the added benefit of creating potable water for underserved or neglected populations (for example Flint Michigan, which does not have safe water to drink) or even man-made lakes for recreation.

    Build 100 nuke plants with these chillers and for 1/4 of one year of the US national budget you could solve global warming in a decade. I honestly don't know why nobody has proposed this, but it probably has something to do with right wing special interests like the Koch Brothers or others who have weaponized global warming against the poor (who are at the greatest disadvantage and have the most to lose as temperatures increase).

    • The 12 years that Methane stays in the atmosphere are negligible compared to the hundreds to thousands of years that CO2 stays in the atmosphere.

    • I haven't bothered to see if your math checks out, but naturally there are other ways besides CO2 to play with the Earth's climate. You can add or remove any number of chemicals to the air. More feasible than what you propose is spraying particles into the upper atmosphere which reflect sunlight [harvard.edu] - and importantly, this has been demonstrated naturally by volcanic eruptions.

      But you miss the point. Doing something novel that changes the natural balance is a very different thing than allowing the natural system

    • Great plan. How are you going to turn those turbines? With steam? Unless that's a closed loop system, that's more water vapor you're adding to the system. Probably more than will be captured by the chiller. And even still, the waste heat generated will outweigh the chilling generated and you've just directly contributed to global warming by heat emissions alone.

    • Don't be a dick all your life (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @11:17AM (#57130778) Homepage

      FFS, 80% of the earths surface is covered in water which is constantly evaporating as part of the water cycle.

      "hundreds of tons per day of water vapor from the atmosphere"

      Wow, that much! Newsflash - More than 1 million tons PER SECOND evaporates into the atmosphere. Google it. Thousands of tons of water is probably already taken out of the atmosphere each day just due to air conditioner condensation you moron.

      You're an idiot, go get yourself an education.

  • Not even for all the magnesite in the world (Score:5, Informative)

    by volodymyrbiryuk ( 4780959 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @09:35AM (#57129956)
    The annual yield of magnesite is more or less 30000000t per year. The amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere is 1090t per second. If we used all the annual yield to bind CO2 we could stop the increase of CO2 for whole 7 hours.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stdarg ( 456557 )

      I'm pretty sure the article is referring to the production of new magnesite, not the use of existing magnesite. So while current magnesite production (from mining) is 30 million tons per year, the point is we could start manufacturing our own magnesite and scale that up.

    • The last two sentences of the article, a comment by another researcher, provide the only information in the article about what they are actually talking about - which is converting magnesium oxide containing minerals (ultramafic rocks) into magnesium carbonate. If this process were adopted on any scale, actual mining of magnesite would likely stop since vast amounts of pure magnesium oxide would be a byproduct.

  • How exactly does a carbonate mineral sequester more CO2? MgCO3 + CO2 => what exactly?

    • You have the MgCO3 on the wrong side of the equation.

      CO2 + ? => MgCO3

      Without looking up this process exactly, I'd guess something like:

      CO2 + MgO => MgCO3

    • The last two sentences in the article provide the explanatory link, but not very well:

      "It is really exciting that this group has worked out the mechanism of natural magnesite crystallization at low temperatures, as has been previously observed—but not explained—in weathering of ultramafic rocks. The potential for accelerating the process is also important, potentially offering a benign and relatively inexpensive route to carbon storage, and perhaps even direct CO2 removal from air."

      Ultramafic rocks are rich in magnesium, with low silica content; the most common form is peridotite. There was a /. story four months ago about this specific subject [slashdot.org], where peridotite outcrops in Oman were discussed. So rocks that have a substantial content of MgO (but are not pure magnesium oxide) are what would be used.

      This requires literally grinding up a mountain of peridotite, and treating it with an aqueous suspensio

  • What do we do with all the Magnesite? Dump it into the oceans? Burn it?

    • That's the beauty of it. Through a second process, we can take the Magnesite and convert it into petroleum products which we can use to run our cars!

      It's win-win!

  • How much C02 does the "process" of producing this material create and how much CO2 does it consume? The article doesn't say. Just being able to fix carbon doesn't mean it's a good thing.

    Often the total CO2 being emitted from the total lifecycle is not being considered and we get things like raising corn to make ethanol to burn in our cars which produces more CO2 than it saves when you look at the whole process, end to end, including the growing, transportation, processing and waste removal. Such things need

  • So currently humanity is emitting about 37 gigatons of CO2 per year, and that number is sadly increasing. Natural carbon absorption can take care of around half of that, so let's say 18.5 gigatons net is added to the atmosphere. To absorb that with this material, we need to produce and store 37 gigatons of magnesite per year.

    To put that in scale, the Alberta sulfur ziggurats were collectively around 15 million tons in 2006 (although they're visibly much larger now), so we'd be looking at around 2500 Alberta

  • One way or another, it will be technological solutions that solve this, not ham fisted and highly selective demonization of modernity.

  • Better yet, devise a system to produce magnesite at an industrial scale to capture CO2, then ship it to Mars, and use an extraction process to pull the O2 from the Magnesite for terraforming Mars.

  • So if I want to remove the 4.6 metric tons of CO2 that I added by driving my car last year, all I'd need is 9.2 metric tons of magnesite? Whoa, what a deal.
  • Brilliant. Because magnesium is plentiful and cheap....Oh wait.

    Calcium carbonate makes much more sense, and even that is fraught with problems.

  • ....about 5 quadrillion kg of this stuff, and we will be good to go.

  • Just expand shellfish farming of bivalves like mussels, clams, and oysters combined with sea kelp and this will do it while growing carbon negative food.

    You're welcome.

  • Careful (Score:3)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @03:04PM (#57132644) Journal

    Nice, but I will post my usual caveat about mitigating global waming. Be careful lest you overshoot and induce another ice age, which can come on in as little as a year or two (just need one summer where the snow doesn't melt and you're screwed.)

    Then you won't cause inconvenience moving in from the seas over decades to a few centuries, but will catastrophically and quickly kill billions via starvation.

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