Good News: Rocks Crack Under Pressure from Mineral CO2 Storage

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By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: When carbon mineralizes in stone, each new fracture exposes more surfaces that can react with and trap CO2, enhancing a rock’s storage capacity. As concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) continue to rise and drive climate change, scientists have been researching options not just to reduce CO2 emissions but also to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. Many carbon capture and storage methods seek to trap gaseous or water-dissolved CO2 in underground storage reservoirs, but these could leak and release greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere. “When you inject CO2 in a gas form, it can escape, for example, if a fault is moving or there is damage to the reservoir. It is always going to be looking for a way to escape to an area where the pressure is lower,” explained Catalina Sanchez-Roa, an experimental geophysicist at Columbia University Climate School in New York City. “But with carbon mineralization, you [store] it as a mineral, as a solid, and then it’s very stably stored for a really long period of time.”.…

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