Stanford University chemists have developed a practical, low-cost way to permanently remove atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main driver of global warming and climate change.
The new process uses heat to transform common minerals into materials that spontaneously pull carbon from the atmosphere and permanently sequester it. These reactive materials can be produced in conventional kilns, like those used to make cement.
"The Earth has an inexhaustible supply of minerals that are capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but they just don't react fast enough on their own to counteract human greenhouse gas emissions," said Matthew Kanan, a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the Feb.19 study in Nature. "Our work solves this problem in a way that we think is uniquely scalable."
Enhanced weathering
In nature, common minerals called silicates react with water and atmospheric CO2 to form stable bicarbonate ions and solid carbonate minerals - a process known as weathering. However, this reaction can take hundreds to thousands of years to complete. Since the 1990s, scientists have been searching for ways to make rocks absorb carbon dioxide more rapidly through enhanced weathering techniques.
Kanan and Stanford postdoctoral scholar Yuxuan Chen developed and demonstrated in their lab a new process for converting slow-weathering silicates into much more reactive minerals that capture and store atmospheric carbon quickly. A grant from the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is now supporting efforts to move the research into practical applications.
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Olivine aérolie weathering naturally. | Renhour48 via Wikimedia
