[Rockhounds] Scientists find way to make mineral which can remove CO2 from atmosphere

[Axel Emmermann]

Hi Kreigh and all,

Naturally, that is good news... on first sight.
I have some reservations though:
- CO2 has to be tackled at the source. You cannot remove it from the atmosphere without building gigantic installations that have to work over centuries to remove whatever CO2 that has been dispersed from pinpoint sources such as factories, energy plants, etc..
- Better make damn sure that the polystyrene catalyst does not end up in the environment. The Oil-companies are already shoving  enough plastic into our lives.
- Can such a filter medium keep up with tons of CO2 produced per hour by say a coal or gas powered energy plant? If not, it would be useless.
- How much CO2 is emitted in mining the magnesium to make it, transporting the ore, producing the polystyrene catalyst, and finally producing the magnesite.

Some of these "inventions" are released into the media to soften the arguments of the climate change camp 😉

Cheers
Axel


-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Rockhounds <rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com> Namens Kreigh Tomaszewski
Verzonden: woensdag 15 augustus 2018 5:50
Aan: Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A mailing list for rock and gem collectors <rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com>
Onderwerp: [Rockhounds] Scientists find way to make mineral which can remove CO2 from atmosphere

Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston.

Scientists are already working to slow global warming <https://phys.org/tags/global+warming/> by removing carbon <https://phys.org/tags/carbon/> dioxide from the atmosphere, but there are serious practical and economic limits on developing the technology. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the rate of formation is very slow.

Project leader, Professor Ian Power (Trent University, Ontario, Canada)
said:

"Our work shows two things. Firstly, we have explained how and how fast magnesite forms naturally. This is a process which takes hundreds to thousands of years in nature at Earth's surface. The second thing we have done is to demonstrate a pathway which speeds this process up dramatically"

The researchers were able to show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst, magnesite would form within 72 days. The microspheres themselves are unchanged by the production process, so they can ideally be reused.


Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-scientists-mineral-co2-atmosphere.html#jCp
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