Turning CO2 Into Rock

It's not looking good for avoiding the impact of climate change.  However, science may step up and provide us with some solutions.  For example,

The technology that turns CO2 into rock

Iceland may have uncovered [a] truly safe method for carbon capture and storage.

CO2 reacts with mineral-rich rocks to turn into a solid.

[R]esearchers in Iceland have developed a method by which CO2 is dissolved in water before being injected into the island’s mineral-rich, basaltic rocks. Here, it turns into solid white calcite crystals in far less than 100,000 years — in fact, it takes just two years.

This is not just theoretical or lab-based research. It has been happening on an industrial scale at CarbFix, part of the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, near Reykjavik, since 2014. Waste CO2 is captured from the power plant’s steam, is dissolved into large volumes of water and injected into the basalt below, between 400m and 800m deep. There the basalt (which contains up to 25% of calcium, magnesium, and iron by weight) looks literally like a black sponge, filled with air holes that the CO2 settles in and forms calcite — or mineralized carbon — within just hundreds of days, not hundreds of thousands of years.

And it turns out that another place besides Iceland is on the track for this kind of sequestration of CO2.  It's also succeeding in Washington State's Columbia Basin:

So why — given the world has abundant basalt and an apocalyptic atmospheric CO2 problem — isn’t the CarbFix model happening elsewhere? “Good question”, says Matter. “The CarbFix model is unique because it dissolves CO2 into water (waste water from the geothermal power plant) during injection into the storage reservoir. This is an ideal situation and it is not possible everywhere to co-inject water with CO2 because of [the lack of] water availability.” However, “it may be possible to inject pure CO2 into a deep basalt formation without co-injection of water”, informs Matter. Preliminary results published from a pilot CO2 injection project into the Columbia River Basalt in Washington State, have done just that.