09:12 am
Rocking Climate Change
One of the best parts of being a scientist is getting enthused about the “what-if” possibilities of a new idea, which must be similar to the enthusiasm felt by political campaigners. In the November 11 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (h/t The Economist — original not yet online, unfortunately), two scientists from Columbia University, Peter Kelemen and Jurg Matter, demonstrated that a single rock (located in the desert in Oman), known as peridotite, is sequestering tens of thousands of tons of CO2 every year, in the process converting the gas to a mineral similar to limestone or marble.
Here’s how The Economist describes it:
Some people have looked at the idea of grinding up peridotite and using it to soak up emissions from power stations, but the process turns out to be expensive, partly because of the costs of transporting all the rock. The transportation would also create emissions. Kelemen and Matter suggest an alternative: pumping the gas from places where it is produced and into underground strata of peridotite.
They then suggest a method of treatment in which the capacity of this CO2 sink could be significantly increased, to the point where it would consume a meaningful fraction of the CO2 produced by humans every year and dumped into the atmosphere.
The team has shown that the Omani peridotite absorbs tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, far more than anyone had thought. By drilling and fracturing the rock they believe they can start a process to increase the absorption rate by 100,000 times or more. They estimate this would allow the Omani outcrop, which extends down some 5km, alone to absorb some 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is a substantial part of the annual 30 billion or so tonnes of the gas that humans send into the atmosphere, mostly by burning fossil fuels.
The science and international relations angle to all of this is that environmental issues such as climate change are global and thus international by definition. Although the impact of climate change may have slightly different manifestations locally, the underlying problem is global. In addition, solutions don’t have to come from any one country, and technically effective solutions almost certainly can’t be implemented by just one country.
Although people generally don’t like to consider this aspect of the situation, minimizing the negative effects of global change, like many other social goods, will have an economic cost, and that cost should be borne globally , since the total may be too expensive for just one country, and the benefits will accrue to all.
Permit me to offer some thoughts on what could be done to follow up on Kelemen and Matter’s discovery:
1. We should be surveying for other naturally occurring materials that could perform similar functions, especially within or near North America and Europe, and China. These could be on either public or private lands but, if the latter, they will instantly become a very lucrative holding when combined with a carbon emission cap-and-trade system, thus encouraging their proper development and use for sequestering CO2.
2. We should explore the feasibility of synthesizing millions of synthetic versions of this type of rock to discover alternatives that could be made cheaply and used locally to scrub CO2 out of emissions from power plants, cars, etc. They may either be more efficient than the naturally occurring material, or could be transformed into an economically attractive product that could then be sold on, thus generating further incentive to develop carbon-capture sinks.
The Obama camp has been notable for its willingness to listen to ideas from all quarters and adopt what might work, so in that spirit I offer these up as a couple of free green business ideas. If anyone knows anyone on the environment/energy team, feel free to pass them on.