Carbon mineralization

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has advised that 100 to 1000 billion tonnes of CO₂ must be removed from the atmosphere by the year 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5 ^oC. Carbon mineralization is a negative emissions technology (NET) that can be used for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from air, returning excess CO₂ to Earth’s rock record where it came from.

Carbon mineralization in mine tailings. The mineral waste produced by some mines naturally reacts with CO₂ in the atmosphere to form carbonate minerals. These minerals provide effective long-term traps for CO₂ and we have shown that their formation offsets ~11% of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from at least one operating mine without the use of acceleration technologies (Wilson et al. 2014).

Our current work focuses on:

• Pilot projects for accelerated carbonation of processed kimberlite from De Beers’ diamond mines.
• Developing new minerals for fast carbonation using a special type of reactivity called ‘ion exchange’. This has potential to open up many types of volcanic and sedimentary rocks, including oil sands, for use in tailings carbonation.

Carbon mineralization of brines. Flowback and produced water generated by the oil and gas industry is exceptionally rich in the calcium and magnesium needed to turn CO₂ into a mineral. We are working to develop the use of brines from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin for carbon mineralization.

Our current work focuses on:

• Laboratory demonstrations of CO₂ mineralization using air and accelerated mineralization using higher concentration (10% CO₂) gases.