Page 8 - CEGE Magazine Fall 2022

CEGE Leads
$11 Million Project to Advance Mineral Carbon Storage
The University of Minnesota Twin with a mafic or ultramafic rock, that GMCS aims to study carbon
Cities is the lead institution on a project that received $10.95 million in funding over four
years from the U.S. Department of Energy to host a new Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC)—the Center for Interacting Geo-processes in Mineral Carbon Storage (GMCS). The center will bring together engineers and scientists from five internationally renowned organizations to study a promising technology for permanent solid storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) in geologic formations.
One method of storing CO in the 2
subsurface is to pump supercritical CO2 into porous rock that is capped by an impervious rock. This method, however, cannot guarantee that the carbon dioxide will stay sequestered in the reservoir. Indeed, if the integrity of the cap rock cannot be CO2, the CO2 could be released again into the atmosphere.
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carbon mineralization, or the process
of converting CO2 into a carbon-based mineral. When CO2 comes into contact
is, rock rich in magnesium or calcium like basalt or peridotite, a chemical reaction produces solid carbonate minerals, locking in the CO2. This process has been observed to occur naturally in peridotite, and pilot studies have been implemented in basalt, but the hydro-mechanical interactions that allow this process to work are not well understood. Due to the abundance of mafic and ultramafic rocks in the Earth’s subsurface—approximately 10% of
the continents and a majority of the seafloor—this process should provide a natural pathway by which CO2 can be permanently stored.
The rate of this process in nature is far too slow, however, to be effective in reducing anthropogenic emissions of CO2; an estimate from 1990 suggests 70,000 years would be needed to remove the CO2 inventory from the atmosphere (Seifritz, 1990). Nevertheless, emerging evidence shows that engineering this process has the potential to significantly increase–by orders of magnitude–the rate of CO2 removal.
mineralization and ultimately engineer conditions that can make this CO2 storage process efficient. The researchers will also work to develop tools and methods for modeling this process and determining how much CO2 can be stored within a specific rock formation. If successful, the work from these University of Minnesota engineers and scientists, along
with colleagues at the University of Southampton, Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, has the potential to make this process widely available and even reverse some effects of climate change.
Recent scientific studies have uncovered a more stable means of storing CO underground by using
[Image shows how veins of rock are formed within another rock. This image was originally posted to Flickr by OliBac
at https://flickr.com/photos/47757737@N00/2175050965 (archive). It was reviewed on 24 January 2019 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.]
8 CEGE | CSE.UMN.EDU/CEGE
This project involves basic research and is underpinned by DOE’s Energy Earthshots Initiatives, which set goals for significant improvements in clean energy technology, including the Carbon Negative Shot, an all-hands-on-deck call for innovation in technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.