Carbon Dioxide is a major contributor to the damaging effect of climate change, and although much time and money has been spent in producing products that are environmentally friendly, none of them have been able to tackle the problem of the rise in carbon dioxide…..until now.
A team of American and Icelandic researchers has been working on a project called CarbFix in Iceland. With its primary focus being on finding new ways to store carbon dioxide, the CarbFix team have just made an amazing breakthrough that could help combat climate change on a global scale.
The way in which it works is by pumping a mix of carbon dioxide and water into basalt rock that is located underground the Earth’s surface (this particular site is based at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in Iceland). Once underground, the mixture dissolves the calcium magnesium found within the rocks, and limestone is formed, trapping the carbon dioxide simultaneously.
Although the project has quite an expensive price tag ($10 million so far), this discovery could prove to be the breakthrough we need in the trying to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and tackle climate change. Scientists are very impressed with CarbFix’s progress since its formation and are extremely pleased that the results they were expecting to take thousands of years to achieve came after just two!
With any new breakthrough in technology, there are always skeptics who are not convinced of the great possibilities the product can bring, and CarbFix is no different. The main concerns the team is having to quell are largely concerned with the storing and monitoring of the carbon dioxide. But, once these hurdles have been overcome, there is no reason why we shouldn’t see an increase of these operations taking place in other parts of the world, with new testing sites already in the Columbia River Basalts already taking place.
By using the natural source such as basalt to trap harmful carbon dioxide, there is not much risk in supplies becoming scarce as the rock is found in abundance all over the world, in particular on the ocean floor, and would be perfect for storing the gas. And with Iceland set to extract and store 10,000 tons of CO2 per year, who are we to argue?
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