Thinking people are continuing to focus on technological advancement and solutions for smarter resource use and cleanup. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that carbon capture and storage is a critical part of tackling climate change in the most cost-effective way. A recent breakthrough in Iceland shows promise in taking existing carbon out of the atmosphere and turning into rock within 2 years. It doesn’t negate the need to reduce production of carbon in the first place, but extracting and solidifying existing gases is part of the solution. See Co2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough:
The unique project promises a cheaper and more secure way of burying CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground, where it cannot warm the planet. Such carbon capture and storage (CCS) is thought to be essential to halting global warming, but existing projects store the CO2 as a gas and concerns about costs and potential leakage have halted some plans.
The new research pumped CO2 into the volcanic rock under Iceland and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.
“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 on Thursday in the journal Science.
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