In a first, Iceland power plant turns carbon emissions to stone June 9, 2016 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Section of rock core from the CO2 storage reservoir showing vesicular basalt with a well-defined fracture with calcium carbonate mineralization. Credit: Annette K. Mortensen. Scientists and engineers working at a major power plant in Iceland have shown for the first time that carbon dioxide emissions can be pumped into the earth and changed chemically to a solid within months—radically faster than anyone had predicted. The finding may help address a fear that so far has plagued the idea of capturing and storing CO2 underground: that emissions could seep back into the air or even explode out. A study describing the method appears this week in the leading journal Science. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-06-climate-mitigation-co2.html#jCp
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312 Abstract Carbon capture and storage (CCS) provides a solution toward decarbonization of the global economy. The success of this solution depends on the ability to safely and permanently store CO2. This study demonstrates for the first time the permanent disposal of CO2 as environmentally benign carbonate minerals in basaltic rocks. We find that over 95% of the CO2 injected into the CarbFix site in Iceland was mineralized to carbonate minerals in less than 2 years. This result contrasts with the common view that the immobilization of CO2 as carbonate minerals within geologic reservoirs takes several hundreds to thousands of years. Our results, therefore, demonstrate that the safe long-term storage of anthropogenic CO2 emissions through mineralization can be far faster than previously postulated.
This is a much better source than the others: it actually explains why basaltic rock is able to achieve this conversion. It is due to the presence of Mg, Ca and Fe silicates in the basalt, which can react with CO2 (or bicarbonate, HCO3- ) to form carbonate minerals. If memory serves, a lot of crustal rocks are aluminosilicate (SiAl) type and would not be suitable, whereas these basalts, being of the SiMa type, contain the right sort of cations to enable this conversion. But someone like Ophiolite would be useful here.
