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Renewable Tuesday: Genuine Carbon Capture [1]
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Date: 2025-02-04
Iceland pioneered carbon capture in basalt rock deep underground. Now we can go them one better, mining basalt and other minerals, grinding them up, and spreading the powders on farm fields to capture carbon and increase crop yields at the same time. That means that we don’t have to capture the CO 2 to inject into wells at considerable expense. These minerals react with CO 2 in the air over a period of years, forming permanent carbonate minerals that are environmentally safe, or bicarbonate ions that get washed into the oceans.
Scientific American, via e-mail:
Absorbing CO2? Rock On Last year, researchers in the midwest spread 190 metric tons of a crushed volcanic rock called basalt over fields that were then planted with corn crops. They found that, over four years, fields treated with crushed basalt and planted with alternating crops of corn and soy pulled 10 metric tons more CO2 per hectare out of the air than untreated plots. And crop yields were 12 to 16 percent higher. These stunning results were an early test of whether the world's farmlands could be used to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and slow global warming. How it works: Why use basalt? As it naturally weathers—gradually dissolving in soil water—volcanic basalt captures CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions in the water, which cannot easily reenter the atmosphere. Instead, the water is carried out to the sea and the CO2 is stored in the ocean for up to 1,000 years. If such a technique were to be scaled up globally, it could remove up to two billion metric tons of CO2 from the air every year, according to experts. The catch: Enhanced rock weather, as it’s called, would require mining and crushing billions of tons of rock every year—enough to build a mountain—and transporting it to farms. The whole process would release CO2. Even so, those emissions would be small compared with the amount of CO2 that the rock stores away for centuries or longer.
It has been known for years that readily available basalts, serpentines, and olivines all work for this purpose, whether in underground deposits (using fracking technology) or as rock dust on the surface. Improving crop yields is a bonus. A teraton of the stuff would be more than enough to remove all of the excess CO 2 in the atmosphere. Of course, we don’t have to go that far, because there are other effective ways to sequester carbon, such as forests and regenerative agriculture, putting carbon into soils and making them much healthier.
Like this biochar, which also greatly increased the soil’s capacity to hold water
Now try telling farmers that they aren’t allowed to use fertilizer because it’s a dreaded Green New Deal plot.
Most of the Earth’s mantle consists of such minerals, but they only occasionally get pushed to the surface.
Basalt columns at Devil’s Postpile NM
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