Trent prof on team trying to combat climate change

Mineral can be used to absorb carbon dioxide

A team that includes Trent University’s Prof. Ian Power, Canada research chair in environmental geoscience, has developed a new way to produce a mineral that can store carbon monoxide.

Magnesite can be used to deal with climate change by reducing carbon dioxide in the air, a Trent press release announcing the discovery states.

“If the team’s findings can be developed and applied to an industrial scale, it will open the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, ultimately countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2,” the release states.

Scientists have been working on different ways to slow the pace of climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air, but have encountered barriers, including costs. The team Power is working with has figured out how magnesite forms at low temperatures, which can take hundreds to thousands of years, and developed a way to speed up that process so that it crystallizes, trapping carbon dioxide.

“Our work shows two things,” Power explains in a press release from Trent. “Firstly, we have explained how and how fast magnesite forms naturally. This is a process which takes hundreds to thousands of years in nature at Earth’s surface. The second thing we have done is demonstrate a pathway which speeds this process up dramatically.

The team can show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst, magnesite can form within 72 days. The microspheres or not affected during the process and can be reused.

“Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude,” Power states. This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient.”

The work was presented recently at the Goldscmidt Conference in Boston.

It was funded by the the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

“For now, we recognize that this is an experimental process, and will need to be scaled up before we can be sure that magnesite can be used in carbon sequestration (taking CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently storing it as magnesite),” Power explains. “This depends on several variables, including the price of carbon and the refinement of the sequestration technology, but we now know that the science makes it do-able.”