Mid East rocks show promise to store CO2
Deserts in Oman are covered with carbonate mineral. (Photo: Peter Kelemen)
Peter Kelemen: It’s going to take an awful lot to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at something less than twice the current concentration.
That’s geologist Peter Kelemen at Columbia University. He’s talking about a kind of rock – called peridotite – found in the Middle Eastern country of Oman. This rock has the potential to store huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide or CO2, which causes global warming.
Peter Kelemen: If we were to put all of the human CO2 that we put into the atmosphere into those rocks in Oman, you could continue doing that for a thousand years without running out of rocks.
That’s still a big ‘if’. The idea though is easy enough. The rocks react chemically with CO2, removing it from the air. Kelemen and his colleague Jürg Matter found that the reaction happens over a thousand times faster than previously thought. Plus, the reaction can be sped up by drilling into the rock, and pre-heating it.
Kelemen: Our calculations suggest, optimistically, that you can take up to four billion tons of carbon dioxide per cubic kilometer of rock per year — and the current human input to the atmosphere is about ten times that, about 30 billion tons per year.
Kelemen cautioned that field tests over the next few years are still needed to show the rock’s potential to help stabilize Earth’s atmospheric CO2.
how does a carbonite rock absorb more CO2 Become a bicarb?. or some other chemical
Jusr how much will this cost?