Turning CO2 to Rock

Turning CO2 to RockTop of Mind with Julie Rose • Season 1, Episode 13, Segment 3

Feb 25, 2015 • 11m

(39:52) Guest: Pete McGrail, Research Fellow at Northwest National Laboratory Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of life. It’s what we exhale in every breath and it’s one of the things left over from most of our means of transportation and energy production. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat, making it a major contributor to global warming. So the focus on reducing CO2 emissions is twofold: emit less and keep what we do emit from reaching the atmosphere. There’s long been talk of trapping CO2 as it escapes the smokestack of a power plant and pumping it underground. But since the CO2 is still a gas, there’s always a chance it could escape and make its way back into the atmosphere. So what if, rather than burying it under a rock, we turn the CO2 into a rock? “What happens when we can extract those metals, is they can bond with the CO2 and form carbonate minerals, what people know as limestone,” says McGrail.

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