Iceland scientists have discovered an amazing technique to cope with climate change---inject carbon dioxide under the ground, in order to convert it into stone. This is a much cheaper and more secure way of burying carbon dioxide.
Earlier, other carbon capture and storage (CCS) methods were used, storing it as a gas. But its problems included high costs and worries over leakage.
Scientists at Iceland's Hellisheidi power plant, the largest geothermal facility in the world, undertook the project. It was increased in scale to bury 10,000 tons of CO2 every year.
Experts with the Carbfix project pumped carbon dioxide into volcanic rock and speeded up the process of the basalt reacting with gas to result in carbonate minerals. It took just a couple of years for the gas to convert into solid. This was faster than the hundreds or thousands of years that scientists had believed it would take.
Experts of the project explained: "A primary goal of the CarbFix project is to imitate the natural storage process of CO2 already observed in basaltic rocks in Icelandic geothermal fields. The project's implications for the fight against global warming may be considerable, since basaltic bedrock susceptive of CO2 injections are widely found on the planet."
For every ton of CO2 that was buried, the technique needed 25 tons of water. Still, Juerg Matter of the University of Southampton in the U.K., leader of the team, suggested that even seawater could be used.
"We need to deal with rising carbon emissions and this is the ultimate permanent storage - turn them back to stone," said Juerg Matter, at the University of Southampton in the UK, who led the research published in the journal Science. "Our results show that between 95 and 98 percent of the injected CO2 was mineralized over the period of less than two years, which is amazingly fast."
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