4 ms·
Any obvious downsides to this approach?
by penneyd 4y ago
Any obvious downsides to this approach?
- sriku 4y agoMight need to be studied in different regions to determine whether there are any detrimental effects. It looks like it might alter the soil pH which could affect crops. Sounds promising though.
- ffhhj 4y agoDo rock minerals capture more oxigen than carbon?
- Maursault 4y agoAlso, inevitably running out of rocks.
- brokencode 4y agoCan somebody who knows about rocks weigh in here? I was under the assumption that pretty much the whole Earth crust was made of rocks, and that we’d run out of virtually any resource before we run out of rocks.
- unlikelymordant 4y agoBasalt is extremely common, its not something that anyone will run out of. We may run out of basalt sources that are close enough to farmland it can be spread on, but it would take a while. And trains would change the economics.
- heavyset_go 4y agoI'd imagine the types of rocks would matter. There are also a lot of ores that should remain in the ground, and not pulverized and spread, contaminating water and soil.
- furins 4y agoAll the oceanic crust is made of basalt, so approximately 2/3 of the planet is covered by several miles of it. Unfortunately mining oceanic crust is impractical, for obvious reasons. However some oceanic crust got trapped between mountain ranges during continental collision, forming ophiolites. These can be suitable mining sites, together with LIPs (large igneous provinces) and the rocks of some shoshonitic (K-rich) basalt volcanoes.
- eloff 4y agoRock is not a scarce resource. The planet is literally made of it.
- WalterBright 4y agoWe're all just pond scum on a ball of molten iron.
- Maursault 4y agoYeah, but it isn't an infinite resource. Eventually, I meant, inevitably, I wrote.
- eloff 4y agoNothing is infinite. For the purposes of grinding basalt rock to sprinkle on farms, it is essentially sufficiently abundant that it doesn't matter.
- ambrose2 4y agoMining the rocks, distributing the rocks to a central processing center, then shipping to the farms is all non-negligible and can easily be net positive emissions rather than sequestration.
- Thorrez 4y agoIt looks like they've considered that: >Their model also incorporated the emissions costs of mining and then spreading this powdered rock over fields. Of course, there's always a chance of errors in both how they estimated these emissions and how they estimated the amount of CO2 that will be removed.
- ambrose2 4y ago> Transportation. Detailed transport analyses (based on UK road and rail networks) were undertaken to calculate distance costs and CO2 emissions for the distribution of rock dust from source areas to croplands. We used the GLiM database for the UK distribution of basalt deposits and the 2019 land cover map (Supplementary Information) to calculate transportation distances, cost (£ t−1 rock dust km−1) and emissions (tCO2 km−1) from potential local rock sources to cropland areas, together with UK road and rail transport networks. Spatial analysis was undertaken with least-cost path algorithms from the ArcGIS software. Yea, it sounds like the model took this into the account, maybe the assumption that rock sourcing could rely on mines within the UK. If so, given the size of the UK, if the majority of transportation is by train and EV over UK distances, this might not be an issue.
- eru 4y agoIt costs a lot of money.
- pfdietz 4y agoNickel pollution.