Core Chemistry
Gabbie Amboss
Current Event 1
February 10, 2015
Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Rock, and Burying It
By Henry Fountain
Fountain, Henry. "Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Rock, and Burying It." The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Feb. 2015.
The article I read called Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Rock, and Burying It by Henry Fountain, published in the New York Times, is about a relatively new concept in which scientists are working with to help fight climate change by injecting carbon dioxide into rocks and then burying it. The article discusses a couple different projects working on this idea all have a little bit different methods than each other in doing so. For example, the Boundary Dam and most other projects use a very similar method. They take CO2 and highly compress it, so it becomes almost like a liquid. They take it and inject it into sandstone mostly at old oil or gas fields. The risk in this method is that once it’s buried the CO2 remains buoyant (able to stay afloat) and can bubble through the surface and back into the atmosphere. The article, though, talks the most about one $10 million project called CarbFix. CarbFix is developing a new way to store the emitted gases from power plants and industries underground. They then take the collected CO2 and inject that into volcanic rocks, mainly basalt, with the addition of water. Their goal is for the carbon dioxide to react with the rock, thus turning into solid minerals. Some setbacks that the article addressed was that in the CarbFix method, it requires water, which can be very costly. Also, there is a risk of leakage so the storage site would have to be monitored for however many years, which can be, as well, very costly. Dr. Juerg Matter, one of the scientists at Carbfix, states, “The problem is big enough. We need many solutions.” He is referring to the on-going issue of global warming and greenhouse gases polluting our air. He believes that steps need to be taken in order to fix this global issue.
The significance of the article is important to humanity because if the experiments and tests continue to go well, we could be looking at a successful solution to global warming. I believe it will take a couple of more years and the development of newer technology, but we are taking a step in the right direction. This project could benefit society greatly because global warming has been a serious concern to many and it shows that people are taking serious actions about it.
I enjoyed reading this article by Henry Fountain because I found it very interesting and informative. I was unaware that something like this was being experimented on. The article wasn’t too dense and I could follow along with ease. The author also decided to talk about some of the risk involved with these types of experiments, which shows that it isn’t perfect just yet and it’s a work in progress. It seems to be a credible article because the author mentions many different scientists with credible associations. For example, Dr. “Juerg Matter is said to be a geochemist at the University of Southampton in Britain and one of the lead researchers on the project” (Fountain 2). The only weakness of the article is that it started to mention other projects beside CarbFix, but mainly focused on that. It would have been nice for the author to maybe expand on those more to show the readers that not only one, but a couple other companies and organizations are working on this type of project. I learned a great deal about steps being taken to fight climate change and overall it was a great and enjoyable article.
No comments:
Post a Comment