An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that anthropogenic CO2 can be effectively captured and permanently stored by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. There the greenhouse gas (GHG) reacts with the surrounding rock to form benign minerals.
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) involves capturing CO2 from the atmosphere or fluegas from a power plant, compressing that gas, and then injecting the CO2 into geological formations or deep ocean waters. While many CCS projects are under development, only one large-scale facility equipped with CCS technology — a power plant in Saskatchewan, Canada — is currently operational. The power plant sells the CO2 captured from its fluegas to the oil company Cenovus for use in enhanced oil recovery.
Several challenges are preventing more CCS projects from coming online. These center around cost and concerns that CO2 pumped into the ground as a gas or liquid could leak out of the rock formations and return to the atmosphere.
A team led by scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia Univ. (NY) and the Univ. of Southampton (U.K.) has demonstrated a different way of storing CO2 that is not susceptible to leakage — injecting it into basaltic rocks, where it reacts with calcium-,...
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