20 Jan Danish researcher captures CO2 with mineral: “The theoretical potential is enormous”
Everyone’s talking about CO2 these days and not only in the now-conventional sense that less of it should be released into the air. Rather, another increasingly common question is how to capture the unwanted gas from the atmosphere – and what to do with it afterwards, writes Energywatch.eu.
However, another topic not as often entertained concerns whether minerals can be taken directly from nature and inserted into source systems.
That’s a mistake, at least if one asks Kristoffer Szilas, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who carries out research in the mineral olivine, which has been shown to be able to draw out large quantities of ambient CO2.
This potential solution is all the more interesting in that olivine is naturally occurring in many places around the world, for instance, in Greenland, Japan, Oman, California and in the Himalayas. Olivine is forced up from Earth’s core via tectonic processes in the form of the mountainous rock peridotite, which is said to comprise more than 80 per cent of the Earth’s mantle.