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Basalts Turn Carbon into Stone for Permanent Storage
Scientists have shown that mineral carbonation can permanently capture and store carbon quickly enough and safely enough to rise to the challenge of climate change.
By Kimberly M. S. Cartier20 March 2020
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage
Editor’s note:
Direct air capture machines suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Are they part of the solution to climate change?
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/100777966
With technology like those being developed and also stopping greenhouse emissions, it is possible to return our atmosphere to pre-industrial conditions in the long term. It is only the will of governments with foresight and an eye for new industry opportunities to make it happen. The likes of Elton Musk who will award $100 million dollars to the best technology for capturing carbon are encouraging that private entrepreneurs will see financial opportunities. Critics of direct air capture (DAC) are archaic, head-in-the-sand dinosaurs unable to think about or accept reality. It is not enough to stop emissions, the greenhouse gasses currently in the atmosphere have to be removed. Aiming to arrest GHG’s and achieve/maintain 1.5 degrees of warming will lead to planetary conditions that are extreme and damaging to a lifestyle that is contrary to what is desirable. What is required is the right Government leadership and vision. Aiming to retain 1.5 degrees warming is a copout to placate polluters.
Carbon Capture and storage (CCS} and direct air capture (DAC) have their challenges and are used by the greenhouse producers to denigrate their development to preserve their profiteering, Instead, they could be leaders in the development of the new technologies in which trillions of dollars are to be made.
Some Interesting Podcasts
Rare Earths and the difficulties of supply
Litigating our way out of climate change
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/litigation-for-nature/13511812
Is dumbness our destiny?
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/dumbness/13511816
The opportunity costs of global pollution
What role will hydrogen play in our future?
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/what-role-will-hydrogen-play-in-our-future/13356484
Emptying the oceans
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/emptying-the-oceans/13191172
Geopolitics in a post-fossil-fuel world
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/geopolitics-in-a-post-fossil-fuel-world/13615058
WHAT IS CCS?
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a proven
technology suite and a vital part of reaching net zero
emissions by 2050, playing a role alongside other
solutions like renewable energy, reforestation, and
energy efficiency. CCS helps mitigate climate change
by capturing carbon dioxide emissions before they
can reach the atmosphere or by removing historical
emissions from the atmosphere.
The first step in CCS is capturing the CO2, which can be done through several different methods, all of which are well-established and effective.
WHY IS CO2 CAPTURE NECESSARY?
Industrial processes such as cement, steel, pulp and paper, chemicals and natural gas processing are significant emitters of CO2, accounting for around 25% of global energy-related CO2 emissions. CCS can be applied in these industries to make a significant reduction in global CO2 emissions. In some cases, CO2 emissions are a by-product of these processes rather than the result of burning fossil fuels in the production process. For some industrial processes (such as cement manufacturing and blast furnace steel making) CCS is the only technological option that can help secure deep emissions reductions now.
CO2 CAPTURE APPLICATIONS
Some of the first CCS facilities are in natural gas processing, as well as fertiliser, ethanol, chemical and hydrogen production. For example, the Sleipner CO2 Storage project in Norway, operating since 1996, captures around one million tonnes of CO2 a year.
This is then injected into a deep saline formation under the North Sea for permanent storage.
In the last decade, applications of CCS have broadened and now include coal-fired power
generation, ironmaking, clean hydrogen production and direct air capture and storage. The first commercial CCS applications in cement production, gas power generation and waste-to-energy are under development.
WHERE DOES CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY GO FROM HERE?
As new projects are announced and developed, the range in the scale of facilities is becoming broader and individual capture plants are getting larger. At the same time, CCS networks are making smaller capture plants economically viable. Modular plants enable more economic deployment of carbon capture at these smaller plants. As capture technologies develop through deployment, capture technology efficiencies are expected to improve. Capture rates over 95% are both possible and feasible.
HOW IS CO2 CAPTURED?
In CCS from point sources, CO2 is captured before it reaches the atmosphere in industries such as cement and steel production, hydrogen production from fossil fuels, incineration of waste, and power generation. Most sources of CO2 from human activity
are impure; mixed with nitrogen, water and other gases. Capture is the purification of CO2 so that it can be economically stored. CO2 can be captured from point sources efficiently with a capture level of over 90% using a range of different engineering approaches.
There are four basic types of CO2 capture: precombustion, post-combustion and oxyfuel with post-combustion, and inherent capture.
Pre-combustion processes convert fuel into a gaseous mixture of hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen is separated and can be burnt without producing any CO2; The CO2 can then be compressed for transport and storage.
Post-combustion processes separate CO2 from combustion exhaust gases. CO2 can be captured using a liquid solvent or other separation methods. In an absorption-based approach, once absorbed by the solvent, the CO2 is released by heating to form a high-purity CO2 stream. This technology is widely used to capture CO2 for use in the food and
beverage industry. Oxyfuel combustion processes use oxygen rather than air for the combustion of fuel. This produces exhaust gas that is mainly water vapour and CO2 that
can be easily separated to produce a high-purity CO2 stream.
Inherent capture processes incorporate the capture of CO2 into the inherent design of the process, never allowing produced CO2 to be contaminated with other gases, keeping it in a high-purity state.
Carbon capture can also facilitate the removal of existing CO2 from the atmosphere: In Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere by vegetation, then recovered from the combustion products when the biomass is
combusted. In Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS), CO2 is captured directly from the air.
Iceland Is Sucking Carbon Dioxide From the Air and Turning It Into Rock
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/iceland-carbon-capture-emissions-into-rock/
To battle climate change, firms are experimenting with a radical potential solution.
SHARETWEETSHARE
Tim Wright/Unsplash
From Thomson Reuters Foundation
February 4, 2021
By Alister Doyle
OSLO, Feb 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — On a barren hillside in southwest Iceland, workers are installing huge fans to suck carbon dioxide from the air and turn it to stone deep below ground, in a radical — but expensive — way to fight global warming.
Engineering fixes for climate change are gaining attention and investments in 2021 as companies such as Microsoft and leaders from China, the United States, and the European Union work on long-term plans to achieve "net-zero" emissions goals.
The movement to conserve the planet.
Count Me In
Elon Musk, chief of Tesla Inc and a billionaire entrepreneur, said in January he would give a $100 million prize for the best "technology for capturing carbon".
Swiss firm Climeworks, which is building the Icelandic site with Carbfix, a unit of Reykjavik Energy, says every technological fix is needed to limit what US President Joe Biden calls a "climate crisis".
But critics say "direct air capture" (DAC) of emissions already in the atmosphere is too costly, particularly compared to simply reducing emissions, or protecting existing forests and planting new trees. *Editor: Far too late and inefficiant to plant trees alone. Trees are only effective after about 30yrs.
Related Stories
As they grow, trees soak up carbon dioxide from the air, lowering the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — and old trees are much more effective at it than new plantations, scientists say.
"We should plant as many forests as we can and protect as many as we can. But we are beyond the 'either/or'," in choosing how to slow warming, said Jan Wurzbacher, director and co-founder of Climeworks.
Sinking emissions
The company is installing eight carbon collectors — each roughly the size of a shipping container — to expand a plant in Iceland that now catches and stores 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, raising its capacity to 4,000 tonnes annually.
Fans suck in air and specialised filters extract the carbon dioxide. Carbfix combines the carbon with water, forming a mild acid that is then pumped 800 to 2,000 metres below ground into basaltic rock.
Within 2 years, 95% of what was carbon dioxide is petrified — turned to rock, said Edda Sif Aradóttir, CEO of Carbfix.
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https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/6-step-plan-for-fighting-climate-change/
But carbon dioxide makes up only about 0.04% of the air and the process of capturing and storing it is complex and energy-intensive, viable in Iceland largely because of a huge, cheap supply of geothermal energy.
US payments company Stripe said last year it would pay Climeworks $775 a tonne for extracting 322 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air — one indication of the cost.
Microsoft similarly said in late January it would invest in Climeworks to bury 1,400 tonnes of carbon — but Climeworks declined to give the price per tonne.
"Climeworks' direct air capture technology will serve as a key component of our carbon removal efforts," Elizabeth Willmott, Microsoft's carbon removal manager, said in a statement.
Microsoft said last year that the company will be "carbon negative" by 2030 — removing more emissions than it creates each year — and would by 2050 "remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."
Other firms working on sucking carbon from the air include Carbon Engineering, based in Canada, which says it and its partners are working to build DAC facilities to capture a million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
That is "equivalent to the work of 40 million trees," according to the company, which makes fuels from carbon dioxide.
Image: Unsplash/Tommy Kwak
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/iceland-carbon-capture-emissions-into-rock/
US-based company Global Thermostat, meanwhile, works with companies including Coca Cola, which uses carbon dioxide to make fizzy drinks, and oil giant Exxon Mobil, which ranks among the world's top corporate emitters of planet-heating emissions.
Climeworks says it is the first to extract carbon from nature permanently, by burying it underground.
Besides its plant in Iceland, it also operates a facility in Switzerland capable of capturing up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the air. The gas is then sold to local greenhouses to boost plant growth.
Not cheap
High costs are a headache for all DAC firms.
"Getting below $200 (per tonne of carbon dioxide) is an important step," said Wurzbacher.
That is about the amount California pays by state credits to support low-carbon transport fuels that can be made with air-captured carbon, he said.
*Editor’s note: There are ways to mitigate costs with entrepreneurial thinking for investment. Profits have been ripped out of the planet since the industrial revolution so it’s now time to pay up and repair the damage.
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A broader $200 per tonne incentive to make fuel for use in cars or trucks could help develop DAC for all uses — including for carbon burial.
Wurzbacher praised companies and countries that were setting goals of net-zero emissions, but said investments, so far, were lagging far behind Climeworks' ambitions of capturing between 30 and 50 million tonnes a year by 2030.
The company raised about $110 million last year in a financing round, he said — far less than needed to meet its goals.
"Having someone like Elon Musk putting the focus on carbon capture and storage is important… it becomes more mainstream," Aradóttir said.
She said turning carbon to stone is a solution that will lock up greenhouse gases for millions of years — far more permanent than planting trees that can suffer logging, land clearance, or more frequent wildfires driven by worsening climate change-related drought and heat.
Aradóttir said she hoped the new plant will be up and running in the spring — meaning April or May in Iceland's wintry climate — despite disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report last year that 15 DAC plants were in operation worldwide, in Europe, the United States, and Canada, together capturing more than 9,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
But that is a tiny fraction of world emissions — the equivalent of the annual emissions of just 600 Americans, each producing about 15 tonnes of climate-changing pollution.
"More efforts needed," the IEA report said in a report headline.
'Speculative'?
A Greenpeace UK report last month was sceptical of DAC technologies saying they were at a "very early stage and extremely expensive."
"Their future availability remains very speculative, although 'silver-bullet' hopes have led to high-profile media coverage," the report noted.
Direct air capture of carbon used to be lumped together in UN scientific reports as a form of geoengineering or altering earth systems to deal with climate change threats.
That put it alongside more speculative technologies, such as dimming sunlight with a veil of chemicals injected into the stratosphere.
Related Stories
Since 2018, however, DAC has been reclassified as a form of "mitigation", or emissions cuts — and newer science reports suggest some level of increased carbon removal from the atmosphere is now unavoidable, whether by nature or technology.
Petrifying emissions below ground won't work everywhere. About 5% of the continents have bedrock suitable for the process, though vast swathes of the ocean floor could work as well, Aradóttir said.
So far, Carbfix has injected more than 65,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ground since 2014, almost all produced by a geothermal power plant, rather than captured from the air.
Aradóttir said there was no sign the underground space was getting filled up as ever more liquid was pumped down.
Wurzbacher says Carbfix's future DAC plants will probably be named after animals. The new Icelandic plant is dubbed "Orca," for the killer whale — though "Orka", in Icelandic, also means "energy". "Mammoth" is one suggestion for another plant in Iceland — a much bigger one.
(Reporting by Alister Doyle ; editing by Laurie Goering. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)
Thanks to this landmark court ruling, climate action is now inseparable from human rights.
Climate correspondent with
De Correspondent
The Dutch supreme court has ruled that the state must reduce its CO2 emissions. The impact will be felt around the world.
Jelmer MOMMERS
Koos van den Berg (left) and Freerk Vermeulen (right), both lawyers for Urgenda, and Marjan Minnesma (middle), director of Urgenda. Photo: Sem van der Wal / ANP, 20 December 2019
You’re not supposed to clap in court – and certainly not cheer. It’s not a football match.
But the supporters of Urgenda, a Dutch activist organisation promoting a sustainable society, couldn’t hold back. Applause burst out as soon as the chairman of the supreme court of the Netherlands said that the Dutch state had definitively lost.
The court ruled the state must reduce CO2 emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 compared to 1990. Doing less is a violation of the human rights of Dutch citizens.
You could see from the composed expressions of the judges – three men and two women whose facial expressions could be compared to those of the bronze statues in front of the courthouse – that they did not take pleasure in ruling against the state. The contrast with Urgenda’s cheering supporters could not be greater.
The judges only did what they had to do: assess whether the government and parliament had remained “within the bounds of justice” in formulating their climate policy.
The session of the supreme court lasted less than half an hour. But world history had been rewritten.
Human rights require climate action
This ruling is not just about the Dutch. It concerns the world because it’s based on human rights. Those human rights – in this case, Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – create obligations for states to protect their citizens against dangerous climate change.
Because Urgenda’s case is based on fundamental rights, the supreme court’s ruling sets an international precedent. Lawyers in other countries can cite this ruling when suing their state. States that do not have an adequate climate policy can be held accountable. They can also be reminded of their obligation to steer the economy towards more sustainable waters.
As a result of Urgenda’s subpoena from 2013, the court in The Hague had already ruled against the state in 2015. But the Dutch state did not agree and appealed. When it lost again, the state went to the supreme court. One of the state’s main arguments was that the Dutch government could not solve global warming on its own so it couldn’t be held responsible.
The supreme court ruled on Friday that argument does not hold because every country is responsible for its contribution to the problem. Serious climate policy should certainly be expected from a rich country such as the Netherlands, which has a relatively high carbon footprint per inhabitant.
What’s more, any reduction in emissions matters. Even if other countries continue to pollute, lower emissions from the Netherlands will have a positive effect on the pace of global warming. “No single reduction is negligible,” according to the supreme court.
The order that the Dutch state must reduce emissions by at least 25% wasn’t made up by any judge. It was calculated by climate scientists and presented in a 2007 IPCC-report as the bare minimum reduction the developed countries of the world needed to achieve by 2020. That number – actually the lower figure in a range of 25% to 40% deemed necessary – subsequently became part of United Nations (UN) climate talks from 2007 onwards. In 2009, the environment minister of the Netherlands told parliament that reducing emissions by 25% to 40% was necessary to stay “on a credible trajectory to keep the 2C target within reach”. The percentage also ended up in a decision of developed countries at the 2010 UN climate conference in Cancún, Mexico.
So it was no wonder that the Dutch courts followed Urgenda’s argument. 25% was the low bar.
Moreover, until 2011 the Dutch government’s policy had been to reduce emissions by 30% by 2020. When the first cabinet of Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, took office in 2011, that percentage was abandoned. From that moment on, the government was aiming for a 20% reduction.
This transcends national borders
In its ruling, the supreme court pointed out that the state had never explained and never scientifically substantiated why, from 2011 onwards, it could suddenly be satisfied with less. Why was the state all of a sudden allowed to deviate from the widely accepted international view that a reduction of 25% to 40% by 2020 of rich countries was at least necessary to keep the 2C target within reach? The government itself had proclaimed this percentage at both international climate conferences and in parliament!
Previous court cases based on human rights had already shown that countries that cannot properly justify their own policies can be dealt with more severely. That’s exactly what happened here.
“The reasoning of the supreme court is convincing,” said Urgenda’s lawyer Koos van den Berg immediately after the verdict. “You don’t think ‘this is a strange conclusion’, you think ‘this is logical’. States have to do their part if they don’t want to violate human rights. That’s why this is a universal statement. Other courts will hear it.”
Jasper Teulings, head of legal affairs at Greenpeace International, believes so too. "This transcends national borders. And it is a source of inspiration for the global climate movement that you can force governments to take the necessary measures. That gives hope, and we all need it. Now we really need to get down to work.”
Methane explained
“Some clarity on Methane Gas”
Cows and bogs release methane into the atmosphere, but it's by far the human activity that's driving up levels of this destructive greenhouse gas.
BY ALEJANDRA BORUNDA
PUBLISHED JANUARY 24, 2019
Every time a cow burps or passes gas, a little puff of methane wafts into the atmosphere.
Each of those puffs coming out of a cow’s plumbing added together, can have a big effect on climate because methane is a potent greenhouse gas—about 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth, on a 100-year timescale, and more than 80 times more powerful over 20 years. The effects aren’t just hypothetical: Since the Industrial Revolution, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled, and about 20 percent of the warming the planet has experienced can be attributed to the gas.
There's not that much methane in the atmosphere—about 1,800 parts per billion, about as much as two cups of water inside a swimming pool. That’s about 200 times less concentrated in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the most abundant and dangerous of the greenhouse gases. But methane’s chemical shape is remarkably effective at trapping heat, which means that adding just a little more methane to the atmosphere can have big impacts on how much, and how quickly, the planet warms.
Methane is a simple gas, a single carbon atom with four arms of hydrogen atoms. Its time in the atmosphere is relatively fleeting compared to other greenhouse gases like CO2—any given methane molecule, once it’s spewed into the atmosphere, lasts about a decade before it's cycled out. That’s a blip compared to the centuries that a CO2 molecule can last floating above the surface of the planet. But there are many sources of methane, so the atmospheric load is constantly being regenerated—or increased.
Methane’s sources
Today, about 60 percent of the methane in the atmosphere comes from sources scientists think of as human-caused, while the rest comes from sources that existed before humans started influencing the carbon cycle in dramatic ways.
Most of the methane’s natural emissions come from a soggy source: wetlands, which includes bogs. Many microbes are like mammals in that they eat organic material and spit out carbon dioxide—but many that live in still, oxygen-deprived spots like waterlogged wetland soils produce methane instead, which then leaks into the atmosphere. Overall, about a third of all the methane floating in the modern atmosphere comes from wetlands.
Causes and effects of climate change
What causes climate change (also known as global warming)? And what are the effects of climate change? Learn the human impact and consequences of climate change on the environment, and our lives.
There are a variety of other natural methane sources. It seeps out of the ground naturally near some oil and gas deposits and from the mouths of some volcanoes. It leaks out of thawing permafrost in the Arctic and builds up in the sediments under shallow, still seas; it wafts away from burning landscapes, entering the atmosphere as CO2; and it is produced by termites as they chow through piles of woody detritus. But all of these other natural sources, excluding wetlands, only make up about 10% of the total emissions each year.
Human sources of methane
Today, human-influenced sources make up the bulk of the methane in the atmosphere.
Cows and other grazing animals get a lot of attention for their methane-producing belches and releases. Such grazers host microbes in their stomachs, gut-filling hitchhikers that help them break down and absorb the nutrients from tough grasses. Those microbes produce methane as their waste, which wafts out of both ends of cows. The manure that cattle and other grazers produce is also a site for microbes to do their business, producing even more methane. There are 1.4 billion cattle in the world, and that number is growing as demand for beef and dairy increases; together with other grazing animals, they contribute about 40% of the annual methane budget.
Other agricultural endeavours pump methane into the atmosphere, too. Rice paddies are a lot like wetlands: When they’re flooded, they’re filled with calm waters low in oxygen, which are a natural home for methane-producing bacteria. And some scientists think they can see the moment when rice production took off in Asia, about 5,000 years ago, because methane concentrations—recorded in tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice cores in Antarctica—rose rapidly.
Methane also leaks into the atmosphere at gas and oil drilling sites. There are strict rules in place in many states and countries about how much leakage is allowed, but those rules have proven difficult to enforce. Recent studies suggest that wells in the U.S. alone are producing about 60% more methane than previously estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Worldwide, the energy sector contributes about a quarter of the annual methane budget.
Another major source? Waste. Microbes in landfills and sewage treatment centres chomp through the detritus humans leave behind and in the process pump out tons of methane each year—about 14% of the U.S.’s annual footprint.
Methane's impact on climate, past, and future
Methane may also have been the cause of rapid warming events deep in Earth’s history, millions of years ago. Under high pressure, as the pressures are found deep at the bottom of the ocean, methane solidifies into a slush-like material called methane hydrate. Vast amounts of methane are “frozen” in place at the bottom of the sea in this chemical state, though the exact amounts and locations are still being studied. The hydrates are stable unless something comes along to disturb them, like a plume of warm water.
A massive warming event that occurred about 55 million years ago may have been kicked off by destabilized hydrates, some scientists think. Methane percolated up from the seafloor into the atmosphere, flooding it with the heat-trapping gas and forcing the planet to warm drastically and quickly.
In the modern atmosphere, methane concentrations have risen by more than 150% since 1750. It’s not clear whether this rise will continue, or at what rate, but the IPCC warns that keeping methane emissions in check is necessary in order to keep the planet from warming further.
The Anzacs
March 2019
It's no secret Australia has been doing badly with far too many extinctions of wildlife, but there's an upside: there are two solutions. We must do both of them.
We modern Australians must embody the spirit of the Anzacs in our care of the Australian environment, that is, fight for it. Even though they perhaps never knew the vocabulary for environmental, evolution and ecosystems, most of them had a strong feeling for those concepts from personal experience in their lives.
We must also work to understand and translate into our own cultural concepts the bond of the Indigenous people before us to this country, its features and wildlife and their deep commitment to protect and save Australia. Because that's what has been so badly lacking in the current NLP government's management of environmental issues and it's what we need to do.
This country is so incredibly uniquely beautiful. It's a stunning concept, a great continent isolated for all time in the so called south of the world, with all its wildlife found nowhere else on the globe and its beautiful ecosystems and environment all intact! That of course is what it used to be like.
The complexity of detailed beauty of our unique iconic wildlife in ecosystems and environments is unimaginable. It's been developed that way by evolution working over millennia making every detail interdependent on every other detail a million times over. We're not used to thinking of it this way, but those wilderness areas sustain us just as they did the Indigenous people before us . We love them. I know this because I love them and need them myself. They belong to us the Australian people and they must be saved in all their detailed beauty and wonder. We love them. That's much of what makes us Australian.
This is what the ANZACs fought for. It's what they remembered and longed for from overseas. Although they didn't know the vocabulary for it that we have
now days most of them knew the environment from personal experience and if we read the letters and writing written overseas and sent home it's easy to trace the key concepts there. Even the mention of small things, eg the smell of eucalypt leaves around campfires in the bush.
And it can all still be saved now. That's what they would want. It's what we want. We can save it if we care enough. Like the indigenous people before us our survival depends on the continued survival of our country and its natural world, these beautiful complex ecosystems .
We must redevelop current initiatives with ecosystem priorities, saving as much of it as we can. Our hearts and spirits and ongoing existence are bound up with such areas. We may not always fully have realised it but our characterisation of the various levels of endangered, vulnerable etc has been our way within our culture of saying how much they meant to us and our distress when any were lost and we had to admit they were extinct.
Please. We need them. I need them. They belong to us the Australian people and they must be saved in all their detailed beauty and wonder. Loving them is what makes us Australian.
This is what the ANZACs fought for. It's what they remembered and longed to get home to from overseas. We are their descendants. We must save it for us and our children and grandchildren.
We can do it, can definitely do it if we care enough. We must be Indigenous and also be modern ANZACs too. Fight for what we love as Australians.
Helen Dowland
Imagine
August 2018
Hydroponics for the future.
A vision of the near future. Northern South Australia and into the Northern Territory, becoming the food bowl of Australia and many other countries. The development of vertical cropping of vegetables in huge sheds is the way forward. The ratio of land used to food production output is incredibly efficient. Water use (Artisan) is also small in quantity per Kilo of food produced.
Trends are showing plant-based food is the only sustainable way to feed people now and into the future.
The burgeoning population, food production, land and resources along with climate change are already at breaking point. To survive we must adapt to a different reality.
Visualize acres and acres of structures for growing hydroponic food with recycling of the water and solar panels on top to support the installations.
To facilitate these Vertical Farms, road and rail infrastructure could be put in place by electrifying the north south rail and using electric road vehicles. Solar farm installations in the abundant sunny centre would boost the power required to assist and support the farming, transportation of goods and add to the national grid.
Desert and sunlight with water underneath must be the epitome of a food producer’s dream come true in light of recent developments.
Examples of the future already in action were shown recently on the ABC program Catalyst, of August 2018.
Companies early into the large hydroponic era of food production will reap the benefits of forward thinking. Those featured in the TV show were Modular Farm System Co. are a complete indoor vertical farming system and Flavorite, “Sophistication and innovation — it is a tried-and-true approach to farming that is paying significant dividends in the paddocks around Warragul in West Gippsland.”
These systems are game changers and early birds will reap the rewards.
Phil Cornelius
For storing greenhouse gas, Google
“basalt co2 sequestration”
Greenhouse gas was pumped into basalt rock and turned into limestone in just two years for permanent sequestration.
By: Henrik Bendix
Scientists started pumping CO2 into the basaltic rock in Iceland in 2011. After just two years, 95 per cent of the greenhouse gas had been converted in solid calcium carbonate, also known as limestone.
Scientists have developed a fast and secure type of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and successfully demonstrated that the greenhouse gas CO2 can be converted into solid limestone in just two years.
CO2 is dissolved in water and pumped into volcanic basalt rocks. Here it is transformed into calcium carbonate--limestone--where it can be safely stored as solid rock and help to combat climate change.
“Within two years, 95 per cent of the CO2 we injected had been converted into calcium carbonate--a very stable material,” says co-author Knud Dideriksen, assistant professor at the Nano-Science Centre and Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The study is published in the journal Science.
New method: fast and safe.
One of the problems with existing CCS techniques is that CO2 gas can easily escape from the ground, says Dideriksen.
"It means that you have to monitor the places where you inject CO2 to make sure it doesn’t escape," he says.
But this problem is tackled by dissolving CO2 in water.
"We dissolved the CO2 [in water], making it heavier than the liquid already down there. The solution dissolves the [basalt] rock and reacts with the CO2 and rapidly forms calcium carbonate," says Dideriksen. "Our method is a fast, effective, and safe way to inject CO2."
Well-known methods take thousands of years.
The speed with which the new method converts CO2 into a solid rock is promising, says senior scientist Niels Poulsen from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), who has studied CCS techniques for many years. He was not involved with the new research.
“[The chemical reaction] can take somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 years in a sandstone reservoir. In the basalt, the CO2 is converted so quickly that it doesn’t have the opportunity to escape through cracks in the rock. It’s incredible that it can happen so quickly,” says Poulsen.
Dideriksen agrees.
The pilot project CarbFix lies 25 kilometres from Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik. Here, thousands of tons of dissolved CO2 have been pumped underground and transformed into limestone.
“The CO2 was converted much faster than we ever hoped. Calculations showed that it could take eight to ten years, but it went much faster. Of course, we’re very happy,” he says.
CCS under way in Iceland
At a test site east of Reykjavik, scientists have pumped up to 230 tons of dissolved CO2 into the calcium-rich basaltic bedrock.
The water easily penetrated the porous, fine-grained rocks, down to a depth of 400 to 800 metres. They added a tracer to the dissolved CO2so they could see if any of it escaped later on.
Eventually the pump broke down as it had become completely in-filled with calcium carbonate. The scientists took a bore sample of the newly formed calcium carbonate to confirm that it was formed by the pumped CO2 and they were astounded by how fast the whole process had been.
Reykjavik Energy are already adopting the technique and plan to inject 10,000 tons of CO2 per year, says Dideriksen.
Ideal CCS for Industry
CCS has the potential to reduce global warming by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing CO2 emissions from industry.
“In Denmark we’re moving quickly towards carbon-free energy mix. So I don’t think that CCS is necessary for our energy production, and the same goes for other developed countries,” says Poulsen.
“But many developing countries are still dependant on coal, and we have a lot of high emission industries that we cannot do without such as the steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser, and paper industries. It could be interesting if we could store a part of this CO2,” he says.
“The U.S. is working on a method to capture CO2 straight from the atmosphere. That would allow us to deal with emissions from traffic. And if you have a power plant running on a biofuel such as wood chips or pellets, then we can reduce the atmospheric content of CO2 by injecting and storing the CO2. There’s a future for this,” says Poulsen.
Trapping Carbon
Scientists Are Trapping CO2 And Turning It Into Stone.
David Nield
Freelance technology journalist
23 NOV 2016
Researchers have turned carbon dioxide (CO2) into solid rock by injecting volcanic basalt rock with pressurised liquid CO2, and letting natural chemical reactions trigger the transformation.
The technique, which takes two years to achieve, gives scientists another option for capturing and storing the excess CO2 humans are pumping into the atmosphere – and could one day be scaled up to take significant levels of carbon out of circulation.
The research was conducted by a team from the the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and builds on a similar experiment in Iceland earlier this year, which dissolved CO2 in water and injected it into a basalt formation.
In the latest study, undiluted CO2 was used, and much more of it was stored at once: 1,000 tonnes of fluid carbon dioxide.
The PNNL team had already shown that the chemical reactions could happen in lab conditions, but until now, they didn't know how long the reactions would take in a real-world setting.
"Now we know that this mineral trapping process can occur very quickly, it makes it safe to store CO2 in these formations," says researcher Pete McGrail. "We know now that in a short period of time the CO2 will be permanently trapped."
In their field study, the researchers injected the fluid carbon dioxide into hardened lava flows some 900 metres (2,952 feet) underground, near the town of Wallula in Washington State.
At that depth, minerals including calcium, iron, and magnesium make up part of the basalt formations. These minerals become unstable, and then dissolve in the acidic conditions created by the CO2.
The dissolving minerals react with the carbon dioxide to form the carbonate material ankerite, which is similar to limestone, and binds with the basalt.
You can see the end results marked by the white areas in the sample shown in the image above.
While turning CO2 into rock isn't a new idea, scientists are working to make the process quicker and more efficient – as original estimates predicted the reactions could take thousands of years.
Basalts are found all around the world, including North America and Iceland, which is one of the reasons the technique could be an effective way of dealing with excess CO2.
But before we get too excited about sending all of our excess carbon underground, there are still some issues to resolve.
Capturing carbon remains relatively expensive, and scientists aren't sure how well these experiments will ultimately scale up, particularly as more and more existing basalt formations turn into carbonate.
Then there's the question of accurately gauging how much storage capacity the basalt actually offers.
Scientists have recently found that our calculations of another carbon storage method – soil's natural capacity to absorb and store CO2 – had been overestimated by as much as 40 percent.
So we need to wait for further tests to be carried out before declaring all our carbon worries over, but it's a promising area of research, and it gives us an end result that's difficult to beat: CO2 in a safe and solid form deep below the ground, where it can't do any harm to the atmosphere or oceans.
"[The CO2] can't leak, there's no place for it to go, it's back to solid rock," explains McGrail. "There isn't a more safer or permanent storage mechanism."
The findings are published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Our story
Founding of CarbFix
The CarbFix Project was initiated in 2006 and formalized by four founding partners in 2007, Reykjavík Energy, the University of Iceland, CNRS in Toulouse and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Since then, several universities and research institutes have participated in the project under the scope of EU funded sub-projects, including Amphos 21, Climeworks and the University of Copenhagen.
PREPARATION PHASE
During the first years of the project, the main focus of the project was to optimize the method through lab experiments, studies of natural analogues, and characterization of the CarbFix pilot injection site, often referred to as the CarbFix1 site, where the pilot injections took place. Design and construction of gas capture, injection and monitoring equipment was carried out simultaneously.
PILOT PHASE
Pilot injections were carried out in 2012 at the CarbFix pilot injection site, located 3 km SW of the Hellisheidi power plant in SW-Iceland. From January to March, 175 tonnes of pure CO2 were dissolved and injected at about 500 m depth at about 35°C, and from June to August, 73 tonnes of 75% CO2-25%H2S gas mixture from the Hellisheidi geothermal plant were injected under the same conditions. Results from the pilot phase were published in Science in 2016, which confirmed the rapid mineralisation of the injected CO2:
“We find that over 95% of the CO2 injected into the CarbFix site in Iceland was mineralized to carbonate minerals in less than two years. This result contrasts with the common view that the immobilization of CO2 as carbonate minerals within geologic reservoirs takes several hundreds to thousands of years.” (Matter et al., 2016)
Mineralisation of injected H2S were reported to occur even faster in .
“…, and essentially all of the injected H2S was mineralised within four months of its injection.” (Snæbjörnsdóttir et al., 2017)
MOVING TO INDUSTRIAL SCALE
Following the success of the pilot injections, the injection was scaled up to industrial scale at Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, with injection of 65% CO2-35%H2S gas mixture at about 800 m depth and about 230°C at the Husmuli injection site, located 1,5 km northeast of the power plant. The injection has been an integral part of the operation of the Hellisheidi Power Plant since June 2014. In 2016, the injection operations at the Hellisheidi Plant were scaled up again, doubling the amount of gases injected. The injection is ongoing today and at the end of 2018, approximately 34,000 tonnes of CO2 had been captured and injected at Hellisheidi. At current capturing capacity, approximately 1/3rd of the CO2 and about 3/4th of the H2S emissions from the plant are being re-injected, or approximately 10,000 tonnes of CO2 and about 6,000 tonnes of H2S annually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L92GLDi9Y4
Articles of Association of Carbfix - 24 April 2020 (in Icelandic)