Technology:

Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Rock, and Burying It (The New York Times)

The work is part of a $10 million project called CarbFix, which is developing an alternative way to store some of the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and industries.

(Courtesy Bara Kristinsdottir for The New York Times)

In a cramped work trailer not far from Iceland’s Hellisheidi plant, a researcher pored over a box of core samples — cylinders of rock that a drilling rig had pulled from deep underground just a few minutes before.

In a test that began in 2012, scientists had injected hundreds of tons of water and carbon dioxide gas 1,500 feet down into layers of porous basaltic rock, the product of ancient lava flows from the nearby Hengill volcano. Now the researcher, Sandra Ósk Snæbjörnsdóttir, a doctoral student at the University of Iceland, was looking for signs that the CO2 had combined with elements in the basalt and become calcite, a solid crystalline mineral.

In short, she wanted to see if the gas had turned to stone.

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