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Scientists Claim Climate Change Breakthrough By Turning CO2 Into Stone
• https://www.technocracy.newsCarbon dioxide has been pumped underground and turned rapidly into stone, demonstrating a radical new way to tackle climate change.
The unique project promises a cheaper and more secure way of burying CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground, where it cannot warm the planet. Such carbon capture and storage (CCS) is thought to be essential to halting global warming, but existing projects store the CO2 as a gas and concerns about costs and potential leakage have halted some plans.
The new research pumped CO2 into the volcanic rock under Iceland and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.
"We need to deal with rising carbon emissions and this is the ultimate permanent storage – turn them back to stone," said Juerg Matter, at the University of Southampton in the UK, who led the research published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Matter said the only thing holding back CCS was the lack of action from politicians, such as putting a price on carbon emissions: "The engineering and technology of CCS is ready to be deployed. So why do we not see hundreds of these projects? There is no incentive to do it."
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2 Comments in Response to Scientists Claim Climate Change Breakthrough By Turning CO2 Into Stone
I'm predicting, based on documented botanical considerations, that if this practice of sequestering carbon becomes widespread a time will come when humans will find themselves suffocating for lack of oxygen. Most of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by ocean algae that feed on atmospheric CO2.
The incentive for anything like this should be the profit that can be gained by the direct storage of the CO2. Carbon taxing the world sound like a Al boar wet dream. There is nothing stopping any country from sequestering CO2 except for the cost of doing so. Also add Less production of goods, less jobs and more costly regulations. Also like most governments you can be sure the regulations will not be even handed. China and counties like them will get a pass, and developed countries who by and large are already under some form of emission controls will pay the dearest. The only benefits I see are to those who can control the carbon foot print regulations and the swaps.