Process That Sucks CO2 Out Of The Atmosphere Can Turn Greenhouse Gas To Rocks

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have always been one of the problems regarding climate change that scientists are still trying to address. Today, the scientific community is set on an ambitious but yet unproven goal: carbon capture, which is a process that sucks the CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of industrial plants directly.

CO2 get injected into basalt rocks where it reacts with free Calcium & Magnesium ions forming MgCO3 & CaCO3 #climate pic.twitter.com/IN1eQyaBe7

— Simi Adeodun (@simiadeodun) June 9, 2016

The two main problems of carbon capture, however, have been its cost, said Science Alert, as well as finding ways to efficiently store or repurpose the CO2 once extracted. A new technique, however, could overhaul and mitigate the effects of these gases to the climate: by turning the said carbon emissions into solid rock.

To do so, researchers pump CO2 and water underground into volcanic rock. Reactions with the minerals in the basalts then convert the CO2 to a stable and immobile chalky solid.

Scientists in Iceland have successfully done this, demonstrating that CO2 emissions could be pumped underground and chemically altered to form solid rocks. Storing carbon underground is not a new thing, but the process worked fairly quickly, as science experiments go.

What is encouraging, according to the team's paper in Science magazine, is the speed at which the process occurs, which lasts only in a matter of months. Lead author Juerg Matter of Southampton University in UK shared, "Of our 220 tonnes of injected CO2, 95% was converted to limestone in less than two years."

He told BBC's Science in Action, "It was a huge surprise to all the scientists involved in the project, and we thought, 'Wow! This is really fast.'"

So what does this mean for the environment? Study co-author Martin Stute from Columbia University's Lamont-Dohetry Earth Observatory said that people can now pump down large amounts of CO2 and be able to store it in a safe way for a short period of time.

With basalt rocks available globally, Dr. Matter said that there won't be a problem regarding their availability to help take care of the CO2 emissions that have been haunting and killing our planet.