Can turning CO2 to rock fight global warming?

Even Earth has its limits.

Too much carbon dioxide in the oceans makes the water more acidic. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet. With emissions from our carbon-based economies still too high, researchers at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are turning CO₂ gas to rock as a way to keep CO₂ that power plants emit from ever entering the atmosphere.

CO₂ gas mineralizes when it reacts with basalt, or volcanic rock, though this process typically happens over hundreds of thousands of years. Columbia’s research team, the Carbfix Project, sped up this process. They captured CO₂ gas from an Iceland power plant, pumped it underground into basalt rock, and, in two years, found that 95 percent of injected CO₂ gas became a white, chalky substance. The gas-to-mineral conversion rate stunned them.

Researchers are now scaling up the experiment by using rock in the Earth’s mantle and by exploring the possibility of storing CO₂-turned-rock beneath oceans off US coasts.

“Iceland was a key demonstration,” said Lamont geophysicist David Goldberg. “The holy grail is off-shore.” Learn more.