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Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air
- petermcneeley 6y agoThis (undesired) effect was occurring within Biosphere2. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2) "This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate in a process called carbonatation, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen."
- eindiran 6y agoThat was one of the most unexpectedly crazy Wikipedia articles I've ever read. The level of intrigue seems completely out of proportion with what the project is. Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) makes an appearance, a hostile takeover occurs, Federal Marshals and local police are called in on 2 separate occasions, former employees sabotage the site, experiments go awry, accusations of research fraud are constantly thrown around. It sounds like the plot of a TV show about a research project. The drama starts in the Group dynamics section of the article amd continues to the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_psychology,_conflict,_and_cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_ps...
- starpilot 6y agoThe documentary Spaceship Earth on Hulu is about all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth_(film). Really worth watching.
- ndesaulniers 6y agoI think there's an allusion to this in Netflix's Space Force?
- bredren 6y agoThere is, this episode was so unfunny we stopped watching the series. I don’t know how you can have that much talent in a potentially funny space and blow it that bad.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoI wanted to like it, but ... just couldn't.
- ndesaulniers 6y agoYeah, I couldn't finish it. Lost interest after the monkey episode. Wisecrack did a criticism video on YouTube that I thought had some fair points: https://youtu.be/49v6m7jQPaQ https://youtu.be/49v6m7jQPaQ
- gorgoiler 6y agoBiosphere 2 was very inspiring. The name felt a bit corny but it was a good brand and they should have extended it to the missions: the first crew would have performed Mission 2, etc. The fundamental project conflict between — as I understanded them — we’re here to prove this works vs we’re here to learn and iterate is fascinating food for thought.
- nabla9 6y agoThe organic soil was too rich, resulting excess carbon that that could not be absorbed by photosynthesis. Concrete absorbed excess CO2 and that removed too much O2 (oxygen) causing problems.
- twic 6y agoSee also the use of olivine in a similar way: https://www.greensand.nl/en/about-greensand/greensand-explained https://www.greensand.nl/en/about-greensand/greensand-explai... https://projectvesta.org/how-it-works/ https://projectvesta.org/how-it-works/
- jeffdavis 6y agoI read about project vesta on HN a while back, and it seemed promising. Why do these approaches not get more attention? Project vesta has the additional benefit that it works directly on the oceans, which may be the more pressing problem.
- mdorazio 6y agoI'm donate to project vesta yearly. Personally, I think the lack of attention is due to its relatively slow pace (compared to the typical news cycle) and the fact that it's simply not going to ever be a revenue generator.
- ipsum2 6y ago> not going to ever be a revenue generator. They could sell carbon credits to companies.
- ProjectVesta 6y agoCorrecgt! We have already generated $250,000 in revenue from our first customer, Stripe. Even though we are a non-profit focused on advancing the science, we can still generate all the revenue required, and we hope our project will be self-sustaining... See the Stripe blog post announcing the purchase: Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases Our post: Stripe and Project Vesta, and what this means for us https://projectvesta.org/stripe-and-project-vesta-and-what-t.. https://projectvesta.org/stripe-and-project-vesta-and-what-t.... Reuters coverage of the purchase: Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe.. https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe....
- linuxftw 6y agoSpreading waste from mining operations is 100% something you don't want to do to farm fields.
- sacred_numbers 6y agoThere are different types of mine waste. Certainly you don't want to spread waste contaminated with heavy metals, but most mine waste is just rocks that have been ground up and filtered by a sluice or shaker table to get the tiny fraction of the ore that is actually valuable.
- linuxftw 6y agoTypically speaking, if you're mining rocks, that's a quarry. The article also suggests using waste from steel and cement manufacturing, which is crazy.
- angel_j 6y agosounds like biomass green hand wave all over again
- 08-15 6y agoIf not rocks, what is it that mines dig out of the bedrock? What's bad about the wastes from steel and cement production?
- nitrogen 6y agoRock is not all made of the same thing. You don't want to put an arsenic-rich rock on farms, for example.
- ggm 6y agoThe article also suggests using waste from steel and cement manufacturing, which is crazy. <citation required> If the production process is happening anyway, and if the waste exists anyway, why is it definedly crazy to re-purpose it? It isn't neccessarily the best at scale economic source of the kinds of rock dust we need, but if you have it, and it worked, then (without citing specifics like cross contamination risks or at scale problems) why is this specifically more crazy than the idea itself?
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoFarmer Bob Cannard of Napa has been saying this for 25 something years now. All that I knew about growing, I know from him and his students. Even though I never had the opportunity to learn from him, I absorbed second and third hand. Farmers have enormous knowledge of earth and plants and trees. I wish they’d be given the recognition they deserve as domain experts. We are just wasting time.
- rglover 6y agoWhat do you think are some ways to boost their voices and/or credibility? Seems like a no brainer to listen to these folks.
- bluntfang 6y agoi think a good first step would be to remove farming subsidies so that they don't make decisions based on the fact that growing corn and soy is profitable because of the subsidies.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoPartnerships and collaborations. Have tech companies sponsor farms by letting them use tech. Many farmers are land rich, cash poor, labour costs eat up profit margins. Many will die. And with these farms, the knowledge. They will sell the land and retire on the proceeds as rich farmland is paved over. What they need is accessible, affordable tech. And where their inherited generational and practical knowledge can be tested and validated and adopted by tech. It needs to be with trustworthy partners who don’t see farmers as future consumers but as collaborators and partners. Current Agtech is geared towards commodity crops and industrial Ag. All farming knowledge that is soil and environment oriented comes from small family farms. Their goal is to keep the soil fertile. The purpose of a farming corporation is to make profits. Not soil health or environment. By asking big Ag concerns to take care of soil, we are burdening them with a job they don’t want..but that requirement towards soil and environment should be part of the tech they use. So the domain experts of soil..the ones who actually have dirty hands by working in the soil should be the ones who help create the tech. Right now, wrong allocation of responsibility to skill is what’s not working. Farming is intuitive. A farmer tries to maintain the soil and make it better. Industrial Ag razes* down soil with each harvest and supplements With inputs and brute mechanical force, they bring soil back to a threshold that is bare minimum for cultivation. That’s why a farmer says that only sun, water and soil is needed to grow food. Industrial Ag needs inputs, machinery and data. As a small acreage soil focused farmer, I say that we need soil, water, sun...and tech. Tech that would replace manual repetitive labour ..labour costs that is killing our profits can be boosted by small acreage automation/mechanization. *i like to illustrate this with a personal example. When I wanted to redo my garden, I wanted to move a couple of structures, add a fountain, plant a few trees, remove some vegetation and put down a walking path with pavers. When I called a landscape architect, he said that we will have to remove everything, create a blank slate and implement the landscape design. That is the difference between farmers and industrial Ag.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoSometimes you will hear the expression: "We think technology will save us. Technology got us into this mess" Or, you might hear about the moral hazard of suggesting that technological approaches could reduce the need for reduced consumption [1] These seem to be compelling arguments for many people -- including those who fund science. Geoengineering is, one might say, a dirty word in the sciences today. Are there any scientists who could weigh in? [1] Hale, B. (2012). The world that would have been: moral hazard arguments against geoengineering. Engineering the climate: The ethics of solar radiation management, 113.
- y4bvusw 6y agoGeoengineering is the vague scientific euphemism better known colloquially as chemtrails, for anyone unaware.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoThat's not at all my understanding eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoengineering 'chemtrails' does not appear in the article.
- y4bvusw 6y agoOf course it does not, because "chemtrails" officially do not exist. They call it "stratospheric aerosol injection".
- jerf 6y agoGeoengineering refers to any attempt to engineer the planet. It isn't just aerosol injection, but would also include solar shades, dumping iron in the ocean, modifications to forest cover, creation or destruction of biomes (e.g., turning the Sahara back into something other than a desert), and in the future, conceivably things like bioengineering species to obtain desired goals (e.g., consider a plant we could farm that somehow sequestered CO2 in a form we could more easily bury). It's the terrestrial equivalent of the term "terraforming".
- deleted 6y ago
- etrabroline 6y agoApparently this process explains a lot of the current climate. https://youtu.be/Yze1YAz_LYM?t=1161 https://youtu.be/Yze1YAz_LYM?t=1161
- mac01021 6y agoThey say treating 1/2 of global farmland with basalt dust would offset the current carbon emissions of Germany and Japan. 1. Why did they choose the two axis powers to draw their comparison? 2. What would be the cost, in additional carbon emissions, to procure, distribute, and deploy all that basalt?
- danans 6y ago> 1. Why did they choose the two axis powers to draw their comparison? Post WWII Germany and Japan are not the axis powers, so this question seems quite irrelevant. More likely Germany and Japan are two industrialized nations the sum of whose carbon emissions roughly equals the amount of carbon that could be offset by this process. > 2. What would be the cost, in additional carbon emissions, to procure, distribute, and deploy all that basalt? For the procurement, they claim near zero: "Basalt is the best rock for capturing CO2, and many mines already produce dust as a byproduct, so stockpiles already exist. " "Basalt is one of the most common rocks on Earth, and waste dust from mining could be used for ERW, as could waste from cement and steel manufacturing. This would remove the need to grind the rocks into fine particles, which requires energy. But how big these waste stockpiles are is unknown." "“We are calling on nations to make inventories,” said Beerling. He said mines in Northumberland, UK, that produce basalt aggregate for construction produced 20-30% waste dust. But he said some mining specifically to produce basalt rock dust would probably still be needed, using existing mine capacity rather than new mines."
- mac01021 6y agoI expressed myself poorly on point #1. I did not intend to ask for a reason behind the axis power thing so much as amusedly draw attention to the coincidence.
- mclightning 6y agoGermany and Japan being two axis powers is so irrelevant to the given topic... GPT-2 is probably smarter than you if this is all the skill you have in correlation.
- perfunctory 6y agoJust in case somebody jumps to the conclusion that this is some kind of panacea. > The researchers are clear that cutting the fossil fuel burning that releases CO2 is the most important action needed to tackle the climate emergency. But climate scientists also agree that, in addition, massive amounts of CO2 need to be removed from the air to meet the Paris agreement goals of keeping global temperature rise below 2C. Basically we need to stop burning fossil fuels and spread rock dust. Short of some miracle, humanity is screwed.
- ancientworldnow 6y agoParis agreement is also built on IPCC models that ignored methane and many other feedback loops. The new model runs for the updated report coming out soon do not and their estimated temps are almost double in many cases (and more in some).
- ncmncm 6y agoRoughly half of the greenhouse forcing in this century is expected to result from hydrofluorocarbons vented from refrigeration systems and industrial processes. Thus, just cutting CO2 accumulation is not enough; we have to remove enough CO2 to make up for the HFC load. HFC is overwhelmingly harder to remove from the air once vented, and no natural process does. Anything that can be done to remove and incinerate HFCs before they get vented pays handsomely. A ton of HFC traps as much heat as 2500 tons of CO2. HFCs, ironically, were once considered world saviors, supplanting CFCs that were destroying the ozone. Now We Know. Ammonia is the best refrigerant I know of, now. I gather it is heavily used in big industrial applications, but people still worry about it in consumer applications. Toxicity is extremely unlikely to be an actual problem, but people panic if they smell a trace amount.
- ericvanular 6y agoReally interesting potential application. Cross posting this on https://collective.energy https://collective.energy for sure
- 8bitsrule 6y agoSpreading green vehicles on the Earth's surface would stop vast amounts of CO2 being added to the air. The fuel cost is none (and sustainable for roughly the Sun's lifetime), fuel-transportation costs much lower, the waste costs almost nil. The investment would be large, the likely return on that investment substantially greater. The more quickly we make this choice, the sooner the world benefits. Removing CO2 may be necessary; stopping CO2 addition has to become a critical priority.
- H8crilA 6y agoCan't find the basic science of the idea in the article - which chemical process makes rock (also which rock) capture CO2? Is there a ton of rocks out there that are rich with unbound metal oxides?
- colechristensen 6y agoThere are many minerals which are ionic compounds of silicon oxides on one side and metal compounds on the other. Grind them up real fine and many of the metals will preferably react with carbon dioxide to make, for example, calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and the silicon and oxygen become silicon dioxide which is ordinary sand. There are indeed a ton of rocks out there bound less tightly to other things. High heat (say, magma) would break up the carbonate so thats why the rocks arent already in that chemical state. (simplified answer from a non specialist)
- H8crilA 6y agoThank you, that makes perfect sense!
- Flogiston 6y ago2CO, + H,O + CaSiO, -> Ca'+ + 2HCO,-+ SiO, -29.6 kcal Underlined digits are lost after copypaste. So in the end you have Calcium bicarbonate that becomes unsoluable carbonate in the end. Its just proof of concept, in the terraforming scales(time + volume of chemicals) it can work, but dropping dust on fields seems like joke
- tejtm 6y agoWow, maybe a mid-80's in the title as that was when I last recall hearing this line of reasoning. - glaciers grind up rocks - ground up rocks end ice age promote life - fresh ground rocks get used up and new ice age - rinse and repeat
- fractal618 6y agoWhat’s the added co2 cost of grinding rocks and transporting them to farms?
- gnicholas 6y agoThere are apparently already stockpiles of basalt dust, though if this were done at a global scale we might need to grind more. I assume the authors accounted for the carbon footprint of distribution, since this was peer-reviewed and published in Nature.
- sacred_numbers 6y agoGrinding rocks to 200 mesh (74 microns) takes about 20 Kwh per ton. Using 100% coal electricity that would lead to 20 kg CO2. Transporting a ton of cargo by truck 200 km creates about 22 kg of CO2. Basalt seems to remove less CO2 per ton than other minerals, but I'm guessing it would still be more than 100 kg CO2 removed per ton of basalt (perhaps much more). Olivine (see Project Vesta) and serpentine are quite efficient; they remove about 1.2 tons of CO2 per ton. Basalt is extremely common, though, so it might win out in some circumstances.
- trustmeimdrunk 6y agoI hate to be the bearer of bad news, as I am happy to see this issue making headlines, but this sounds like something out of Mike Judge's Idiocracy universe. It's probably a really bad idea to spread rock dust on arable land. The mixture will probably retard the natural soil microbiota, and at worst render land unusable. Just try adding a bunch of concrete dust to your basil plant in the window sill, see what happens. Most likely this will be the source, as concrete waste is a huge issue in most population centers. Natural microbiota, the life in soils, are our best bet at sequestering our overabundance of atmospheric ghg, because we literally have to do nothing. Just leave it the fuck alone. Most land is not past the point of no return, and most land is not being used to grow essential food crops. Our actual food is grown on a very small part of farms worldwide and has lots of room to intensify while reducing energy and chemical inputs. Rebuilding and growing bogs, marshes, and wetlands should be our top priority if we want our great-grandchildren to enjoy the world outside of a cave or a bubble.
- ggm 6y agoyou know, if you showed us you are a soil agronomist, and cited something we might agree. Or, we might look at the other people commenting some of them who do cite references, who say this isn't retarding natural soil microbiota and isn't going to the at-worst case, making land unusable. your example of "try this at home" is not actually good. concrete dust before hydration is completely different to the dust made post hydration, or fly ash, or surplus rock dust from mining. The properties of the pre-build and post-build chemical reactivity of concrete (its an exothermic reaction) need to be borne in mind. That said, aggressive de-carbonisation of industry and agriculture, biochar, wetland remediation, re-forestation are probably vital, and urgent.
- jaclaz 6y agoMaybe you are confusing (or I am not understanding) concrete dust with cement dust. Concrete dust should be the result of demolition of concrete (already hydrated when it was cement to form the concrete, i.e. post exothermic reaction). But, allegedly, the concrete surfaces (not reduced to dust) exposed in the Biosphere2 was sequestering both CO2 and oxigen, and - at least in that case - the "solution" was a supplement of oxygen, so maybe the concrete (not cement) dust uses both CO2 and oxigen while basalt only or mainly uses CO2? Also, whether it is basalt or concrete dust, wouldn't this treatment alter the pH of the soil? (at least here historically where there is an excessively acid soil it is often corrected with additives like calcium carbonate or similar).
- beervirus 6y agoNot much information about the actual mechanism at work here. Why farmland specifically? Why basalt specifically?
- kthejoker2 6y agohttps://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-... I assume farmland because it's convenient for mass spreading and well-irrigated.
- chidg 6y agoFarmland is a good place to put it because rock dust is also high in phosphorous and other minerals and for that reason is often used anyway as a fertiliser, particularly in organic agriculture. Basalt is one of the types of rock that can react with CO2 to trap carbon.
- waheoo 6y agoI wonder if there is a similar carbonation that can occur in sea water.
- tim333 6y agoYou can try putting iron in it: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/iron-sulfate-slow-global-warming.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
- walleeee 6y agoCrops also sequester CO2. Breeding and/or engineering for traits like deeper roots can increase the rate of uptake and also improve yield. There is a lot of potential computational work in this area (automating phenotype data collection with robotics, growth modeling, data engineering and web development for science gateways) and more research is needed. The funding is there for this in the U.S., e.g. from the DOE.
- aitchnyu 6y agoIndia now uses rock dust for cement aggregate since excavating river sand is causing environmental problems. Would concrete buildings help?
- Flogiston 6y agoConcrete production emmits 8% of the world co2 pollution. Man-made concrete doesnt help us in this way
- StavrosK 6y agoDoes producing concrete use fossil fuels? Not for energy, but in the actual chemical process, like plastic does.
- Bjartr 6y agoCarbon dioxide is emitted as a by-product of clinker production, an intermediate product in cement manufacture, in which calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is calcinated and converted to lime (CaO), the primary component of cement.[1] [1] https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gp/bgp/3_1_Cement_Production.pdf https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gp/bgp/3_1_Cement_P...
- dzhiurgis 6y agoUS$80-180 per ton of CO2 * 16.50 metric tons of CO2 emissions per USA capita (2014) = between 1,320 and 2,970 USD per year for keeping our planet in check. Maybe multiply by 3x to exclude children, retired and unemployed. Not too bad for a median USA income. Same for Indian - 10x less emissions so about 130-300 USD per year.