Farm fertilizer could suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

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By Robert F. Service, Science. 

Excerpt: If humanity wants to avoid a climate catastrophe, sucking up the carbon dioxide (CO2) it has already spewed into the atmosphere may be its last hope. One approach is to use naturally abundant minerals as CO2 sponges, but the process is slow. Now, a study reported in Nature suggests a way to accelerate it: by converting those minerals to compounds that bind CO2 faster and are similar to others already widely used in farming. ...direct air capture (DAC)...requires building expensive CO2 capture plants and consumes some 2 megawatt hours of energy for every ton of CO2 wrung from the air. ...Another approach is carbon mineralization: spreading vast amounts of crushed alkaline rocks—usually abundant magnesium silicates, such as olivine and serpentine—on soils worldwide. The pulverized rock binds CO2, permanently locking it away in mineral form. Nature already performs carbon mineralization on a grand scale, in a process known as weathering. But natural weathering takes millennia. ...Unlike magnesium silicates, calcium silicates react quickly with CO2. If implemented on a global scale, say, by adding these crushed minerals to agricultural soils, the process could draw down billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 per year, Kanan and his postdoctoral assistant Yuxuan Chen estimate in the new research.... 

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