Sequestering Carbon: the Answer Could Be at Our Feet

September 26, 2009

Went to a meeting of the North Texas Energy & Environment Club, a well attended affair with a nice mix of students, staff and faculty from the University of North Texas. Met Greg Hawk, who whispered in my ear that he knew a little something about a process (possibly carbon negative, possibly market worthy) that would sequester carbon in an agrichar (see biochar). I leaned in. He said "I'm sure you're familiar with pyrolysis." I nodded yes, because maybe this is something that I should be familiar with (and, assuming I caught the word correctly, I would look it up later, so when I nodded yes what I really meant was that I would become familiar with pyrolysis shortly).

Hmm? What? No one told me about a new, carbon negative way of sequestering carbon. The last time I paid attention to carbon sequestration, it was all about deep sixing CO₂ in the Marianas Trench or the Norwegian North Sea, which came with big price tags and fretting about the CO₂ leaking from its sequestered places. Now it appears we can just burn up some agrichar and throw it in the dirt, where it remains, inert and sequestered.

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