New Cure For Global Warming is Nothing But a Bunch of Sand
Exciting research from Harvard University looks to kill global warming with silica
More than two thirds, or about 71%, of the Earth’s surface is covered by salty bodies of water. These oceans are a rich reaction site for aqueous chemical reactions. Researchers at Harvard seek to set these reaction to work in taming one of the most contentious and troublesome issues of our times — global warming.
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Kurt Zenz House is a doctoral candidate in Geosciences at Harvard University. For several years House, with the help of some of the brightest minds at Harvard and partner universities, has researched novel solutions to the tricky problem of global warming. His basic approach has been to store carbon dioxide in Earth’s largest sector by surface area — the oceans. This is an intriguing idea, as the ocean already stores CO2 in sediments and in the water. Ocean water stores CO2 in acidic form as carbonic acid, H2CO3.
House’s initial work was performed with Harvard’s Daniel P. Schrag Ph.D, MIT’s Charles F. Harvey Ph.D, and Klaus S. Lackner Ph.D at Columbia University. This work studied deep sea storage of CO2 in ocean sediments. It illustrated how the high pressures and low temperatures of ocean depths would help dissolved CO2 deposits stay in place, even in the case of geomechanical perturbations including earthquakes and volcanoes.
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Furthermore the formation of hydrates offers even more security for this deep seas storage of carbon dioxide. House estimated in his paper that the deep ocean area along a 200-mile stretch of U.S. commercial coastline could store thousands of years of current U.S. CO2 emissions.
Not satisfied with this solution, House continued his research into how to sink carbon dioxide into the ocean, shielding the Earth from any atmospheric effects, such as warming or weather changes.
Now House has released exciting new research with the help of his brother Christopher H. House at Penn State, Harvard’s Daniel P. Schrag Ph.D, and Michael J. Aziz Ph.D (also from Harvard). The new research studies how to increase the solubility of CO2 in ocean water, using everyday materials.
By exposing ocean water to silica rocks, hydrochloric acid will be removed from the ocean via electrochemical reactions and neutralized. The silica rocks will be weathered into sand, giving the process its name — “Engineered Weathering.” The ocean water, freed of hydrochloric acid, will shift towards alkalinity, causing it to compensate by absorbing more CO2 to form carbonic acid. The effect would be exponential, as hydrochloric acid is far stronger and acid than carbonic acid.
The approach benefits from the fact that Silicon as crystalline silica is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust.
It is estimated in the study that it would take between 100-400 kJ/mol for one mol of CO2 to be captured and stored on relevant timescales. While a significant energy expenditure, this might be considered acceptable to reduce global warming.
The method seems processing because it could be used across the world and in remote locations, with minimal impact to the environment, if executed properly. The only environmental concerns would be to make the pH transition from the process slow enough that the HCl was replaced with sufficient carbonic acid before continuing the process. Also, the effects of ocean chlorine ion concentration on sea life, including sea crops, would need to be examined.
Global warming is certainly a contentious issue. At the heart of the debate is what kind of changes in the environment it will manifest and whether warming is anthropogenic (human-caused). DailyTech blogger Michael Asher frequently points to incongruities in the data, for example in a recent blog he pointed to a study that indicated that global warming began 250 years ago. On the same token other blogs at DailyTech point to information that indicates that global warming will have a very real effects on weather.
Al Gore, former Vice President, was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work regarding global warming awareness that culminated in his film An Inconvenient Truth.
Will this solution be enough to satisfy opinions as diverse as these? No one can say for sure, but for now it certainly seems to be an intriguing step in the right direction. In the meantime, Kurt House will be hard at work coming up with advanced fossil fuel and carbon storage solutions.
dailytech.com
Tags: global warming
November 27th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article New Cure For Global Warming is Nothing But a Bunch of Sand, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.