Carbon Dioxide Sequestration by Mineral Carbonation
by Rangana Wijayapala
Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels have served as the primary energy source to feed the “world energy hunger”. Unfortunately, it is now evident that this combustion of fossil fuels isthe major contributor to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels leading to global warming and other adverse environmental effects. Mineral carbon dioxide sequestration is one of the many promising techniques that have been proposed to mitigate this problem. Accordingly, carbon dioxide (CO2) is eliminated through a reaction with calcium or magnesium silicate minerals to form solid magnesium or calcium carbonates (mineral carbonation) which subsequently can be disposed. Current mineral carbonation research focuses primarily on magnesium silicate minerals such as serpentine and olivine due to their availability, cation concentration, and reactivity.Even though the mineral carbonation reaction is thermodynamically favored, it is kinetically hindered and therefore requires vast amounts of time to naturally sequester large amounts of CO2. The pH swing CO2 mineralization process uses ammonium salts such as (NH4)2SO4, NH4Cl, and NH4HSO4 to overcome the kinetics barriers.
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