CO2 Solved?

November 11, 2008

Well, partly, anyway. Here’s a recent report from a recent Academy of Natural Science pub on getting huge amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Sounds too good to be true? The magical, naturally occurring rock is called Peridotite and it may enable a very simple and scalable approach with permanent storage (no chance of leaks), low cost and low maintenance, and it's being tested soon. Here a snippet:

Accounting for engineering challenges and other imperfections, they assert that Oman alone could probably absorb some 4 billion tons of atmospheric carbon a year-a substantial part of the 30 billion sent into the atmosphere by humans, mainly through burning of fuels.

And better yet, there's plenty more peridotite outside Oman. From a climate change mitigation perspective, it may well become the world's pet rock.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons