How to fight warming? Just lock CO2 in rocks
"Whether we do it in the next 50 years, or the 50 years after that, we're going to have to store CO2," Columbia University's Wallace S Broecker said in an interview in New York. The world is already storing some CO2. As a byproduct of Norway's natural gas production, for example, it is being pumped into a sandstone reservoir beneath the North Sea. But people worry such stowed-away gas could someday escape, while CO2 transformed into stone would not. The experiment will take place below the landscape of this place 29 kilometers southeast of Reykjavik.
HELLISHEIDI, ICELAND: Sometime next month, on the steaming fringes of an Icelandic volcano, an international team of scientists will begin pumping "seltzer water" into a deep hole, producing a brew that will lock away carbon dioxide forever. Chemically disposing of CO2, the chief greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, is a kind of 21st-century alchemy that researchers and governments have hoped for to slow or halt climate change.
The American and Icelandic designers of the "CarbFix" experiment will be capitalizing on a feature of the basalt rock underpinning 90% of Iceland: It is a highly reactive material that will combine its calcium with a CO2 solution to form limestone — permanent, harmless limestone. Researchers caution that their upcoming 6-to-12-month test could fall short of expectations, and warn against looking for a climate "fix" from CarbFix any year soon.
In fact, one of the objectives of the project, whose main sponsors are Reykjavik's city-owned utility and US and Icelandic universities, is to train young scientists for years of work to come. A scientific overseer of CarbFix — the man, as it happens, who also is credited with coining the term "global warming" four decades ago — says the world's failure to heed those early warnings, to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions from coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, is driving scientists to drastic approaches.
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