Scientists turn carbon dioxide into stone to tackle climate change
Scientists in Iceland have succeeded in turning carbon dioxide into stone in a span of months by pumping it deep underground, facilitating a new way of storing the greenhouse gas to deal with climate change.
The pioneering experiment mixed CO2 emissions with water and pumped it hundreds of meters underground into volcanic basalt rock — where it swiftly turned solid, according to an article in the US-based journal Science.
“We need to deal with rising carbon emissions. This is the ultimate permanent storage — turn them back to stone,” said Juerg Matter, the lead author of the study.
According to the report, carbon dioxide is a key factor in global warming, and experts have long urged innovative ways for “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS, solutions.
Earlier attempts to inject CO2 into sandstone soils or deep saline aquifers have faced difficulties, as they relied on capping rocks to hold the gas down, prompting fears that it could ultimately leak.
However, the Carbfix project at Iceland’s Hellisheidi plant — the world’s largest geothermal facility, which powers Reykjavik — sought to solidify the CO2 instead.
The plant produces 40,000 tons of CO2 per year, just five percent of the emissions of a similarly-sized coal plant, though still significant.
In 2012, scientists began pumping 250 tons of CO2 mixed with water underground.
The project has been expanded as encouraged by the success, and project handlers will be burying some 10,000 tons of CO2 each year starting this summer, according to Edda Aradottir, who heads the project for Reykjavik Energy.
“In the future, we could think of using this [method] for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt, and there are many such places,” said the study’s co-author Martin Stute, a hydrologist at Columbia University’s Earth Observatory.
Basalt makes up most of the world’s seafloors and nearly 10 percent of continental rocks, according to the study’s researchers.
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