This century could be make-or-break for climate change and now, a team of researchers has come up with a new way to tackle global warming - turn heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas into harmless rock.
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.
The Hellisheidi power plant is the world's largest geothermal facility; it and a companion plant provide the energy for Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, plus power for industry, by pumping up volcanically heated water to run turbines. But the process is not completely clean; it also brings up volcanic gases, including carbon dioxide and nasty-smelling hydrogen sulfide.
Under a pilot project called Carbfix, started in 2012, the plant began mixing the gases with the water pumped from below and reinjecting the solution into the volcanic basalt below. In nature, when basalt is exposed to carbon dioxide and water, a series of natural chemical reactions takes place, and the carbon precipitates out into a whitish, chalky mineral. But no one knew how fast this might happen if the process were harnessed for carbon storage.
"This means that we can pump down large amounts of CO2 and store it in a very safe way over a very short period of time," said study coauthor Martin Stute of the Columbia University, adding "In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there's a lot of basalt and there are many such places."
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Lead author Juerg Matter, an adjunct researcher at Lamont now based at the United Kingdom's University of Southampton, said, "We need to deal with rising carbon emissions. This is the ultimate permanent storage - turn them back to stone."
The study appears in the journal Science.