Technology:

Rock Solid Solution (Slate Magazine)

A new project partners with geothermal power plant to stash carbon dioxide in the form of minerals.

How can we get rid of excess CO2? Geologist Juerg Matter of the University of Southampton, U.K. is a principal investigator of the Iceland-based project CarbFix, whose recent results show it has safely stored nearly 170 tons of carbon dioxide underground by reaction with minerals—stashing it in rock so it can’t leak out again. The next step is to go big.

"In our pilot project in Iceland, called CarbFix, we take CO2 and wastewater from the same geothermal power plant and inject them together. The CO2 dissolves and, like in a bottle of sparkling water, it stays dissolved as long as it's sealed. It then reacts with calcium and magnesium silicates in rocks to form carbonates.

For CarbFix the electricity comes from geothermal power, so the emissions penalty for injecting dissolved CO2 is on the order of 0.2 percent. With electricity from a coal-fired power plant, the penalty would be much higher, over 10 percent of the volume stored."

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