Look no farther than Richland, Wash. for ways to combat climate change
Nov 28, 2016, 10:48 AM
President-elect Donald Trump famously tweeted that climate change was a Chinese hoax, but that hasn’t discouraged scientists from looking for ways to do something about it.
And there are two developments that look promising.
Just across the state in Richland, Wash. at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researcher Pete McGrail has figured out a way to pump carbon dioxide into basalt bedrock, which then turns the gas into solid stone.
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“Once the CO2 is there underground, a process occurs where it begins to react with the minerals in the basalt and then the CO2 … converts back to solid rock. So it’s the most permanent, safe storage for CO2 there is.”
It’s similar to the way organic forms of carbon become coal over millions of years. But in this case, CO2 pumped into the Earth solidifies in just two years.
McGrail presented this approach to the Greenhouse Gas Technologies conference in Switzerland and he pointed out that the obstacles aren’t technological. Oil and gas companies are doing basically the same thing with fracking. It all comes down to the cost. Transporting CO2 gas to a location where it can be pumped into solid rock is expensive. And the only way to motivate businesses to spend the money would be to impose a carbon tax.
However, the Washington Carbon Emission Tax failed on the ballot.
But turning carbon into rock isn’t the only solutions. There’s a process that turns carbon into cash.
Adam Rondinone, senior scientist the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explains his approach:
“One good strategy for dealing with climate change is to actually make it economically sensible for companies to go the low-carbon route,” he said. “If we just impose costs for everybody we’re going to get a lot of pushback.”
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His nanotechnology breakthrough turns carbon dioxide into ethanol fuel, by reversing the process of combustion.
“The byproducts of combustion are carbon dioxide and water … what we’re doing here is starting with carbon dioxide, instead of taking energy out in the form of heat, we put energy back in in the form of electricity. Water, plus carbon dioxide, plus electricity, yields ethanol.”
The advantage to what Rondinone is working on is that it uses untapped energy to produce ethanol from CO2, for about $2 a gallon.
“There’s no real technology, other than ours, for capturing CO2 and converting it to a useful product directly,” Rondinone said. “That’s why this is a discovery.”
It’s not a perfect solution.
“Is it going to solve the problem? Well no,” Rondinone admitted. “It can be a part of that solution. The CO2 problem is huge. But every bit of CO2 we can prevent from going into the atmosphere, or we can re-purpose, or we can supplant from somewhere else, is Co2 we’re going to save. And we’re going to need a lot of different solutions working together to deal with climate change. There will be no single solution to climate change.”
So there you have it – two very real solutions for, at the very least, reducing or neutralizing many CO2 emissions.
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