Carbon sequestration is an integral part of reversing climate change. The question becomes, where can we permanently store all of that CO2? One possibility lies in the basalt rock under the ocean floor. In fact, Earth science researchers at Columbia University have a project in the works that could scale up to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospin.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast, episode number four. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m here with Christophe Jospe, my co-host.
Christophe Jospe: Hey there.
Ross Kenyon: We’re up in Lamont. I’ve never been here before. It’s right outside the city of New York over the George Washington Bridge. It’s really beautiful. I don’t really know much about it, though. What is going on up here, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: I’m going to keep you in the dark. That was intentional.
Ross Kenyon: Very rude. I don’t like that.
Christophe Jospe: But we’re sitting right next to Dr. David Goldberg. How about we let him introduce himself? Okay.
Dr. David Goldberg: Hi, my name is David Goldberg, and I’m a professor here at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. So it’s a laboratory of Columbia. It’s been here since 1949, originally established on the estate of Mr. Thomas Lamont. If you look out the window, you see his estate house behind you.
Ross Kenyon: I haven’t seen that yet. I’ll take a look. Oh, literally right there. Oh, okay.
Dr. David Goldberg: And he was a financier who basically donated his estate as property in the era of Dwight Eisenhower when he was president of Columbia University. And four specifically earth science research.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. It doesn’t really feel like the city. I feel like I’m already miles and miles inland and far away. I mean, like in the forest, it’s really beautiful up here. Nice. People here are mostly working on earth sciences. They’re working on climate issues. That’s what you guys are working on.
Dr. David Goldberg: Oceans, climate, a lot of climate research and related topics. Oceanography certainly is how this place began.
Ross Kenyon: This sounds very science fiction to me because I’m not a scientist. My background is very strongly in the humanities. You’re mineralizing carbon under the ocean. That’s what you’re known for. That’s what you like to work on. Is that so?
Dr. David Goldberg: My research has been exactly that. It’s the idea of taking carbon dioxide and putting it away permanently below the ocean floor. Why under the ocean? Why there? Well, there’s a typical rock that’s under the ocean. In fact, under all the oceans and you’re looking at some of them. I didn’t plant those samples on the table here too. In advance, but those are basalts. It’s the kind of rock, the most abundant rock type of basement on the planet. And all the oceans are underlay by this rock. So there’s a lot of it.
And it’s about 10% of the continents as well are also have this rock.
Unknown speaker: I see.
Dr. David Goldberg: And you can see it’s got little gaps and pores in it. And when it’s basically lava, that’s cooled.
Ross Kenyon: Producer Paul, you should get some pictures of this and see these little holes here.
Unknown speaker: Thank you for reminding me. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So you can tell us this rock is like a little bit porous and you’re saying you’re filling this up with carbon. That’s what you’re trying to do.
Dr. David Goldberg: Well, it’s a process that will ultimately fill up some of those spaces. You’re injecting carbon dioxide and with water and that rock, it reacts and creates limestone or chalk or rocks that we call carbonate, minerals that we call carbonate. And they fill up those pores or in fact, cracks at contacts where layers of those rocks are on one on top of another and there’s a lot of it. We expect to be able to inject a lot. And then have this process occur that allows the carbonates to form. And then you’ve taken carbon dioxide, which is in the air, in the atmosphere, a gas.
You’ve injected it, pressurized as a liquid, and then you just converted it into a solid. So you’ve taken it from the most active high energy phase to the ground state. I see.
Ross Kenyon: And when people talk about carbon sequestration, I feel like trees get a lot of attention, but then you’re doing, is it direct air capture and then you’re mineralizing it? Is that the process? You’re just pulling it out of the air, right?
Dr. David Goldberg: Right. Well, that’s one way. My research has been on the storage side. Basic question I’ve been thinking about is what do you do with all of the CO2 once you’ve got it? I don’t really care where you get it from. I’m agnostic about whether you get it from the air or power plant. There’s differences, of course, but as far as putting it away is where my research has been studying. But that answers the question partly is that you can get it out of the air, direct air capture style. And I think there’s some really interesting research I’ve done.
And continue to do with people who are doing the capture side from air. And you’re able to capture it and put it away in places that you put it that are far from people and far from things that people make and build is a good thing. And one of those is the ocean or the ocean floor, one of those possible storage spots. So, putting those two things together has really great future potential.
Ross Kenyon: Is that why you’re friends with Kristoff and you guys see each other around? I know you’re like a big direct air capture guy.
Dr. David Goldberg: I think that’s how we met originally, right? Through our previous lives.
Christophe Jospe: I like to hang out with people who know what to do with my CO2.
Ross Kenyon: Some place to put it for you. It’s like your mom picking up your toys off the ground, putting it in the box.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Got to hang out with, you know, the... Garbage man, not to say CO2 is garbage or you’re a garbage man, but you got to put it somewhere and being able to permanently take care of it lets me sleep better at night.
Ross Kenyon: Well, you’re a used carbon salesman. He can be a carbon garbage man. I don’t see the problem.
Dr. David Goldberg: I don’t mind that being called that at all.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like the king of the dump, the carbon dump.
Dr. David Goldberg: My three-year-old would appreciate that. Oh, yeah. But really the idea of carbon dioxide is a waste and we have to take care of our waste products is the roots of this issue. And until it’s considered a waste, no one’s going to pay for putting it away. So that is a major issue, I think, in how this will come to pass.
Ross Kenyon: But the technology is captured from the air. And you like storing it under the ocean. You’re a little biased though because you’re an oceanographer. I feel like you’re trying to get that forest in there. Why not Siberia? Why not someplace else? Is it cheaper? Is it easier? Safer?
Dr. David Goldberg: So first question is first whether I’m more biased and I just know more about the oceans. I’m not saying. Yeah, of course. So that’s probably the reason why I focus there. But the other part of the question is where else can you do it? And absolutely. In fact, it’s been done twice and In small scale, very small scale, and it’s continuing to be done on land.
Ross Kenyon: Is this the Iceland thing I keep hearing about?
Dr. David Goldberg: One is the Iceland project and another one, a very similar project in Washington State in a basalt layer that is Eastern Washington State called the Columbia River Plateau, Columbia River Basalt, which is a massive basalt layer cake structure. It’s a lot of ways similar to Iceland, which is all basalt as well. And both experiments injected CO2 in slightly different ways, which is interesting research for me. But they both produced carbonates quickly. That was the crux of their research is that the carbonate was created in those pores, in those rocks, in those layers, those open layers of those rocks within a couple of years.
That reflected what was expected from laboratory work. But in the field, people expected, in fact, thousands of years for that process to happen. That was the prevailing thought before these two projects, which both concluded relatively recently, a couple of years ago. So Iceland project is still going on. They are injecting much more than they did in their initial project, and they’re still seeing rapid carbonation, mineralization of intercarbonates. So that’s a great result, the fact that it’s still happening and that it happens quickly. Those are important results. Then the question is, how can you export the technology and upscale.
Because without the volume solution, I don’t think it matters too much. So taking the Iceland technology or the Columbia River technology and upscaling it to millions of tonnes, not just hundreds and thousands of tonnes, then we’ve got a technology that really works. And the ocean, I think, is one of the large places where you can deal with this at millions of tonnes scale.
Ross Kenyon: Who pays for this? Who wants to get this process going?
Dr. David Goldberg: At the moment, we have a project which is government funded, US government.
Ross Kenyon: So they would be paying you to put the carbon in the basalt?
Dr. David Goldberg: This is just a research project. They’re funding the idea of the question about scaling up the kind of pilot experiments that were done in Washington State or in Iceland. The idea of scaling that up is really where my research has been focused and doing that in a place that I know something about, the ocean floor. And that project is ongoing. It involves researchers from both the Washington State Project and the Iceland Project because they’re the ones who’ve done the fieldwork to date. And we’re trying to think about basically all the steps that would be needed to scale that up to millions of tonnes a year injection in a place that’s offshore not far from your home.
Well, far in a sense of miles, but in the general vicinity of the Pacific Coast.
Christophe Jospe: Same state. Maybe there’s a field trip in our future. I hope so.
Dr. David Goldberg: I hope so. We’re not at the field trip stage yet, but we’re doing research of where can we find those CO2 in those volumes? How would we get it physically from one or multiple locations offshore? What’s the cost benefit of doing it one way versus another? That’s all part of the project. Doing offshore storage has been done in a global sense, but it hasn’t been done here yet, meaning in the US. So the regulations is important to think about and work through all that.
Christophe Jospe: So all those pieces are So when we’re talking about storing carbon dioxide and basalt, and you’re telling me that the process happens quite rapidly, I think, what is it? In two years, you’re able to store 95% of the carbon dioxide you inject under there. That seems like a pretty big deal because the monitoring and verifying that what you wanted to get rid of is now gone. Those costs go away dramatically. Is that correct?
Dr. David Goldberg: Yes. To some extent, if you’re confident, then those costs would disappear or at least be much, much reduced. At this point, that’s a part of the research agenda though. The CarbFix project in Iceland injected and they found 95, 98% of their injected carbon dioxide was carbonated, mineralized in two years. Great result. And it seems to be happening quickly as they scale up as well, which is also a great result. But the way they monitor it was, in their case, was just by tracing what they injected. We haven’t come up with the solution of how to monitor the rock once it’s mineralized in place.
So we’re working on schemes to do that. That’s part of the research. So figuring that out.
Christophe Jospe: There’s an isotope, what is that, C14 that doesn’t exist naturally down there and you’re able to tag the carbon dioxide with it so you know that if it comes back up, well then you weren’t successful in your storage process. That’s what they did in Iceland.
Dr. David Goldberg: They’re called tracers. Carbon-14 is a very lightly radioactive carbon molecule, and you watch it in your injected fluids. And if you see it, you have a problem. But once you’ve carbonated the rock, mineralized it into carbonate, to verify that it’s there in place is still a challenge. So we have to figure out how to do that. That would help build confidence, and then you can start to think about walking away from monitoring.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, this is the thing that mineralization gets me excited about too, because we talk to agroforestry people and there’s a concern of like, how do you know how much carbon is being sequestered by trees and all that? How much is getting released every year? And so I’m like, the idea of direct air capture and storage, you’re just done, no monitoring, the cost of which dropped dramatically. So I’m a little sad to hear that maybe it’s not as simple as I thought.
Dr. David Goldberg: Well, in the end, it would be. In the process of building a technology is what we’re talking about doing here. And an industry, a big industry, probably a Trillion dollar industry if this actually became a process that happened everywhere.
Unknown speaker: I read that number too in a New Yorker article.
Dr. David Goldberg: That’s where I got it from too, a recent article. And that came from the carbon engineering folks, I think, in British Columbia. That’s a big industry for the capture side and then you have the storage side. So there’s going to be a process there. It’s not unlike the size of what is now the oil and gas industry in reverse. That scale of industry has a lot of technology and a lot of research and 100 years since the oil and gas industry has been going on, 100 years of research and technology and engineering going into understanding everything on the extraction of petroleum and carbon.
The same would happen on the reversing the flow. And we’d want to understand all those details about reactive transport and carbonation and monitoring it and Once we got there, I think we could really reduce the costs. But we’re not there, so it takes some time. I guess that’s all I’m saying.
Christophe Jospe: Wow, something, an industry the size of oil and gas, in order to store a lot of carbon that we’re trying to both pull from the air and get at the centralized emissions. That sounds like something that needs to scale up rapidly, hopefully better. It delivers the same sort of surprise that you found in your research that you’re storing carbon more quickly than you previously thought. But talk to us a little bit about scaling up. So you start with a project, a science project, if you will, and as you move that project How does it get bigger and bigger?
And sort of what scales are we talking about? And what are the boxes to check off to know that things are happening the way you hope they plan out?
Dr. David Goldberg: Right. So I think I can explain a little bit about what our project is in the offshore Pacific Northwest as an example of that. But before I say that, what they’re doing in Iceland is in fact scaling up. They started with a very small project, injection project early, about 250 tonnes of CO2. So not a lot. Out of their power plant is a geothermal power plant. They injected that and they monitored that and produced this result, this fast reactivity result. They’re scaling up because they have the source of CO2 right on site in Iceland from the geothermal plant.
And they’re scaling up to 10,000 plus tonnes capture and injection a year. So that’s a pretty significant bump up and a scale up that is available to them because they have the source. They have the transport. It’s about 50 yards to the north to their injection site, and they can do all the monitoring and all the technologies right there. So they’re set up perfectly to do this kind of scale. But I think ultimately they’re limited in the amount of CO2 they could capture and then inject, at least at the moment.
One of the things that they’re doing that’s interesting, which is really a pilot of something we proposed, I proposed with our friend in Arizona, who’s now in Arizona, Klaus Lochner, was an idea of taking air capture, and we talked about at the beginning, air captured CO2 and scaling that up. To a volume that can be injected into a remote basalt ocean reservoir. And we did a sort of a thought experiment of what that would take energetically. I’ll come back to that, but the idea of the storage in Iceland, they’ve taken a power plant, capture power plant that is a Swiss project called Climeworks, and they’ve taken a unit from them and put it Right next to the power plant in Iceland, the geothermal power plant in Iceland.
It’s a very small amount of CO2, but it is air-captured CO2 and it’s being injected with the Icelandic CO2 in exactly the same way. That’s one way. If that could scale up to a million tonnes on the air capture side, then you’re starting to get volumes that are probably at the next level of injected, stored, and monitored a million tonnes. The working number is a million tonnes for a commercial scale.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re mineralizing this carbon under the ocean, how do you get it there? Are you getting it there on land and then concentrating it in like a big ocean tanker? So it really is like oil and gas, but in reverse? Are you like building pipelines across the country, like from collection points to storage points? Is it just going to be oil pipelines, but for carbon?
Dr. David Goldberg: So I’ll tell you about the project in the West Coast, which is exactly what we’re thinking about right now. So it is targeting upscale that is on the order of a few million tonnes a year to be a net lifetime reservoir capable of 50 million tonnes of CO2. So that’s pretty significant. It’s more than has been injected in any single or even Many combined storage projects around the world to date. We’re trying to put together the pieces where we get that CO2 from, how we would get it from point A to point B, how we get it from point B to our site offshore, which is several hundred miles, how we get it into the rock and then monitor it.
So it’s the whole package. It’s a holistic study. And we’re looking at all those options. The offshore piece is most effective with ship transport just because it’s flexible and we can start and stop it and it’s not a large capital expenditure up front.
Ross Kenyon: Is it like big tanks that compressed CO2?
Dr. David Goldberg: CO2 is almost always transported in a compressed state, even in a pipeline. Now, in the long run, if you’re pushing a lot of CO2 like the oil and gas industry does use CO2 for what they call enhanced oil production now, and there are many pipelines Usually concentrated in the Gulf Coast area to get more oil and gas out of existing wells using CO2. They pump in CO2 and that has been the conventional way of thinking about storage. You just do that, leave the CO2 there rather than recycling it, take your enhanced oil or gas recovered and sell it.
And the idea has been to use that So it is a lot like the oil and gas industry. In fact, all the technology is oil and gas technology and it exists. So there’s nothing stopping us from doing this except the motivation to do it.
Christophe Jospe: And it seems, at least from my understanding, there has been a good deal of oil and gas activity that’s pumping CO2 under the seafloor in Sleipner in Norway. How does that relate to the work that you’re involved with?
Dr. David Goldberg: So the technology is very, very similar. If this 50 million ton pilot project scaled up and do something on the order of More permanent, like the Sleipnir project in Norway, which is a project that is in Norwegian waters. It is funded by Statoil, the operator of this field. Basically, the source of the CO2 is a little different is that they produce natural CO2 with gas, which they’re splitting at the surface. And they’re re-injecting the CO2 rather than just venting it to the atmosphere, which is a good thing to do. And they’re re-injecting it and they’ve injected something like 20 million tonnes over 20 years.
And they’ve monitored it, but it’s been in a sandstone, which is just basically a plume of CO2 that’s dissolving in the water that’s in that sandstone. And they’re watching that. By and large, as far as we know, it’s not mineralizing. So the scale up would be very similar, if not identical, in basalt, except the reservoir is different.
Ross Kenyon: I have kind of a goopy question. I wonder if I’m going to be embarrassed if I ask it. Can we shoot it into space? Is that really stupid? And can you just pump it up there? Can you not do that?
Christophe Jospe: You know, I’m really glad you asked that because you’re not the only one who’s asked, hey, couldn’t we just shoot this excess CO2 into space? Think about when your producer Paul has to jump in on this one.
Paul Gambill: When you’re sending anything into space, you have to think about the payload and the weight, the mass of the material that you’re sending up there because you have to burn highly combustible rocket fuels to get it up there. And it’s very, very, very, very expensive to lift any amount of mass into orbit. So it’s nowhere near cost effective and it’s nowhere near energy effective because you’d have to use a ton of energy just to get it up there.
Ross Kenyon: Do I have to wear a dunce cap or go sit in the corner or something now?
Christophe Jospe: No, I think Dave just didn’t want to dignify that question.
Dr. David Goldberg: Honestly, you’re making me think about it, but I think you’re right. The volume, we’re talking millions and billions of tonnes of CO2. We emit 30 some odd billion tonnes a year globally.
Paul Gambill: For scale, think about like SpaceX is sending up rockets pretty often now, and they’re I think somewhere in the scale of 60 to 70 million dollars per launch. And if you want to send a very small satellite that’s like the size of a loaf of bread, that’s going to cost you tens of millions of dollars to get that one small satellite up there that might weigh like five to 10 pounds.
Ross Kenyon: I was thinking it’s gas. It can’t just you put a pipe, you just put it in there. Can’t it just go? Well, I mean, this is so dumb.
Paul Gambill: In our sci-fi future of having space elevators, that’s maybe a more feasible option, but that’s pretty far away. I play the Civilization games, the space elevators. We have to survive this climate change thing first before we can get them done.
Unknown speaker: Not where you go from there. Get us back on track.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to. I really like the concept of storing carbon dioxide under oceans rather than on land because it seems like one of the issues that you don’t have to deal with is this concept where not under my backyard, right? Not in my backyard, NIMBY becomes NUMBY and you get around that concern. Do you see that being an issue with other types of processes which are trying to store CO2 directly underground? And does that naturally favor any source of carbon capture, be it from the air or power plants that are close to the coastal areas?
Dr. David Goldberg: I totally agree. Ideally, getting this whole business out of sight and out of mind will help a lot in making it a viable, acceptable technology. So, oceans appeal. Subocean appeals a lot for that reason. It is more expensive to work offshore.
Unknown speaker: How much more expensive?
Dr. David Goldberg: Well, depends on what you’re talking about. It does cost you something for shipping 100 miles versus 50 yards as they are in Iceland. I mean, it’s considerably more expensive. Tens of dollars per ton of CO2, probably just in the shipping, additional shipping costs versus doing it literally right underfoot. And CO2 right now, depending on where you are, sells for a few dollars for particular uses. Like in Texas, I think it’s a few dollars for the use for enhanced oil and gas. So anything that’s of that scale, it doesn’t have a market incentive.
So it is more expensive to install things offshore, to build pipelines or ship, whichever would end up being. Platforms can be expensive for injection or even wellheads. But again, all that exists and it survives in a market that’s funded by the oil and gas business today. That entire industry was built in 100 years from really nothing, first oil fines, to what we see today. So the technology is there and the market can be there if we have a price on carbon. Getting back to your question, dealing offshore is a more expensive solution than going next door to your power plant, which is next to a city, usually, or often, which provides the electrons to the city to make the lights go on, but also has...
Anywhere from 5 to 50 million people living in and around it. So putting all those two things together, energy production, storage, and capture, just inherently is going to run into problems, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Is there concern about danger or is it just an eyesore? Are these things ugly industrial buildings or what’s the hang up with on land? What do people care about? I wouldn’t personally mind, I don’t think, hearing about it.
Dr. David Goldberg: You’d be fairly unique, I think, in terms of the public’s perception of putting what they see as a volatile gas below their feet. Now, mineralization helps that a lot. But that helps that perception a lot. But I still believe doing that, whether it’s injection of liquid phase CO2 just as conventional or as a mineralization offshore is a benefit.
Ross Kenyon: Do people think of carbon dioxide as like a dangerous chemical? I guess in the sense that it’s causing climate change, it is, but also you exhale it. I’ve seen those like videos where people asked, would you like to ban dihydrogen monoxide? And of course, this is H2O water. Like people are always like, oh, yeah, it’s terrible. It’s not organic. It sounds terrible. So I don’t know, people all get upset about all sorts of things where you’re like, this is not really a concern. But you think it’s possible that like NIMBY mentality might be preventative?
Yeah.
Dr. David Goldberg: It definitely exists.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Dr. David Goldberg: It definitely exists. And the solution, a part of a solution is mineralization because I think that satisfies the permanence question. Sure. Whether it exists in people’s minds or in reality. And offshore satisfies the not NIMBY to some extent.
Christophe Jospe: I know we’ve been throwing some big terms around and for our listeners, can you define mineralization? Yeah.
Dr. David Goldberg: So we talked about that right at the beginning. The idea here is that the carbon dioxide and water and a rock, particularly rocks that are rich in a few specific elements, calcium, magnesium, iron, but primarily the first two, such as basalt. There are other rocks that have other, they’re called magnesium silicates because they have silica and they have magnesium and calcium. But basalt and lavas are rich in this. These are rocks that are susceptible to Being converted or having those magnesium and calcium and iron elements leached from them when exposed to water and CO2.
The reason water and CO2 react is that basically is a light acid. It’s carbonic acid that once it is injected in that form, Or dissolves. So Perrier is a light acid with dissolved CO2 in water that reacts with these calcium, magnesium elements in these rocks that neutralizes it. And in the neutralization process, the calcium, magnesium combine with the carbon and create carbonates. So that’s mineralization. You’re taking the basalt and the water and the carbon dioxide and creating calcium or magnesium carbonate.
Ross Kenyon: I have a question about ocean acidification from carbon is a big deal. Is there some way to marry these things and you take the carbon out of the ocean and just like stick it underneath the ocean? Is it easy to decarbonize the ocean?
Dr. David Goldberg: So that’s a very interesting thought and it’s been proposed. The energetics of it are a little unsure because you have to move a lot of water.
Ross Kenyon: Is it pretty diffuse in the water?
Dr. David Goldberg: Well, it’s the upper section of the upper few... Say 100 meters of the water is what is being acidified by the natural process of carbon uptake in the oceans. That’s happening. Half the carbon that’s emitted to the or resident in the atmosphere is being taken up by the ocean surface water in natural process. So that acidifies it, but you’re doing exactly the same thing. You’re creating carbonate, bicarbonate in the surface water that is inhospitable for very low tolerance creatures who live there. Kills coral reefs and moves fish stock to more habitable areas.
But that water that’s then acidified at the surface would be essentially the same kind of thing that we would ultimately want to be injecting into basalts. So it does happen naturally, in fact, and the ocean floor where there are circles. So the idea was to take the surface water and pump it down into these rocks, let it naturally Carbonate, just as we’re suggesting to do, and then return pH neutral water or less acidified water back into the ocean at depth. That little cycle is a natural cycle. And if we can enhance it and pump from the surface of the water into these rocks, and you’re basically doing a water capture scenario, not unlike the air capture concept.
Still carbon removal. Still carbon removal. You’re doing it in water. My understanding is that the energetics, the amount of energy required to pump that much water down and the temperatures involved to deepen up to be in an active temperature zone are very significant. But the concept is valid.
Ross Kenyon: Was I right about something?
Dr. David Goldberg: What? Yeah, sure.
Paul Gambill: Shocking. I want to ask about when injecting into the basalt rock, what steps are taken to avoid leakage?
Dr. David Goldberg: So two things to mention. One, the process of carbonation mineralization is a natural process. It happens in basalt rock in the ocean floor, on land, in these other rocks that we’re just talking about, peritite. What we’re doing is accelerating the process. The way that we accelerate it is with technologies that we know exist and There’s human error. There’s unexpected consequences. There’s all the issues about doing the experiment. And what we know about injecting is pretty solid from oil and gas experience. We can build a well. You can put something called a bottom hole assembly or a blowout preventer.
So you can inject pressurized fluid. You can do all that. You build steel casing into the rock. You cement that in place. You monitor outbound the seabed. So all those things would happen normally. So you’d be able to monitor it. And I think there would be, by and large, no major unexpected leaks. There may be leaks, but there wouldn’t be unexpected and not able to mitigate. So you could do something that would allow you to, like a blowout preventer, just as we know, the one that didn’t work in the Gulf of Mexico for oil well.
But that same technology would be able to shut off if it was maintained properly and managed properly. It would be able to shut off something if there was a leak through the well. The bigger problem, I think, is that you’re starting to inject an acidified fluid and finding materials that are not going to be degraded in a substantial way, or at least knowing when they are degraded and monitoring that. That’s part of this whole idea of technology evolving as this industry evolves. And it has been. There are CO2 resistant cements and CO2 resistant steel.
That’s been developed and exist. So you would continue to do all that and do everything you can to make those leaks and the results of them minimal. But if it did leak, and I mean leak, not explode, you’re in a basalt hundreds of meters below the sea bottom with hundreds of meters of Potentially mud, sediment, shale, which will cap it in there. And below that, you’re in hundreds of or thousands of meters of water, cold water. So there’s a lot of protection above your reservoir. And by the way, CO2 is naturally emitted in bubble form all over the ocean floor.
It comes out of the ocean bottom in a volcanic sense. So I don’t think, barring any very catastrophic event, even natural leakage, if there is any, that is undetected would have much impact.
Paul Gambill: Sounds to me then like because of all that protection that’s sort of built in because you’re doing this under the ocean floor, it makes more sense to do that there than any sort of land-based rock formation.
Dr. David Goldberg: I think it adds that. That’s one of those fears, if you will, that are perceived about doing it on land, that it’s not safely away.
Paul Gambill: How far away is necessary? Like are we talking the same sort of distances that oil rigs might go off coast?
Dr. David Goldberg: So I don’t think that distance matters so much for that purpose. It matters more of them for cost. Once you’re under the ocean floor and you’re under the mud in the basalt and underwater, you have those protections. If you choose your site, which would be a lot of effort put into choosing proper sites. The distance does add cost, but you certainly could envision rigs hundreds of miles out and we have that. I mentioned this thought experiment we did years ago. In a very remote place where we put basalt and air capture together at a site that’s basically the most remote place on the planet in the southern Indian Ocean, which is a basalt island.
In fact, it’s a microcontinent, all basalt, called Kerguelen Island. Microcontinent. The microcontinent.
Christophe Jospe: I remember Klaus describing that project as finding the most inhospitable location.
Dr. David Goldberg: Well, he never forgave me for costing him 50% of his energy that he needed for the air capture by choosing that spot.
Christophe Jospe: As a theoretical physicist would. Yes.
Dr. David Goldberg: It wasn’t a real experiment, but it is a far off place, far from everything, which has its advantages. But you’re not going to put a power plant there or even an injection plant unless you have a reason. So the idea of storage was the reason. It also is probably one of the windiest, consistently windy places on the planet. And it’s also about... Five degrees centigrade and 90% relative humidity all the time. So it’s pretty inhospitable. Nobody lives there except for a few scientific outposts.
Ross Kenyon: Just like birds live there.
Dr. David Goldberg: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a big whaling drop-off point in the 1800s, 1700s. And it was industrialized to some extent, if you want to call it that, with what industry there was. They exported like 100,000 barrels of oil from there to power England in those days. So, you know, technologies change. Anyway, this place was inhospitable, but it was very windy. And the thought experiment we did was that we captured the wind using onshore and offshore wind turbines in a large but reasonable sized area. Produced enough electricity to both capture CO2 using a technology that Klaus was using at the time and then store it on site without much transport.
We were able to minimize the transport cost, eliminate essentially any being near my backyard scenario, but it was a relatively modest impact. I think we had about a 10 kilometer circle wind farm. I had enough power to capture. And this is why he was so upset because we had enough power. That was easy because it’s very windy, but we only had ability to capture about 75 million tonnes of CO2 a year, which is a lot. It was half of what he thought we would be able to capture if we were able to do that in a desert using his technologies.
But it was just a thought experiment. So basically, there was a lot of energy and the air was moving. And we had some interesting results that were a bit surprising and that actually the temperature effect being cold helped us capture a little bit more efficiently because it was windy and cold. The humidity for his technology is not ideal. But the storage volume was there’s billions, hundreds of billions of tonnes capacity. So the idea was this was a permanent capture, storage, energy production hub, far from everything. So again, it was a concept.
Christophe Jospe: Right. And as you said, you’re agnostic as to where you get the CO2 from, but what really matters is the reservoir that you end up choosing. And of course, site selection is important. You talked about storing millions of tonnes. Imagine we’ve got a reservoir, but how large can that go? And how do you choose some of the best reservoirs or optimal reservoirs to store CO2? And what’s the sort of decision-making process that you go through?
Dr. David Goldberg: I like the oceans for the reasons we’ve talked about, sub-ocean and those basalt reservoirs. One of the other reasons for studying the area in the Pacific Northwest is we know as much as we know about any spot in the ocean crust about that spot. There’s been enough work there, enough research for many years. We know a lot about it and we don’t know enough. We spend a lot of time picking the best spot that we could that is both practical and useful. For that purpose, if we got a little more serious about it, we’re starting here.
We’ve already learned some things geographically that are relevant to maybe moving our potential reservoir a little bit east, a little bit south, a little bit turned in a little bit. We’re studying it. You want to find Find a spot that has enough reservoir space to handle billions of tonnes of CO2 ultimately and be in basalt and carbonate it. We need to think about how fast that reaction mineralization process happens. I think that is going to be different everywhere you go. So you need to sample and test that and decide where your sweet spot is.
Just the right amount of the right rock, the right volumes, the right injection strategy, all those things combined. And there’ll be a lot of research, I think, defining that for each spot.
Christophe Jospe: And do you have a submarine going around? Well, yeah.
Dr. David Goldberg: Stop trying to get on the submarine, man. I know what you’re up to. So when we get this pilot going, there’ll be AUVs and ROVs down there monitoring the drilling process and injection process, all the technologies that can come to bear on things we do today. For the petroleum extraction would happen.
Christophe Jospe: So that’s my turn for potentially uninformed question. I just finished a book called Seasteading. Have you heard of this term before? Seasteading.
Unknown speaker: Spell it.
Christophe Jospe: C-S-E-A. Homesteading on the C. Homesteading on the C. Oh, okay. And the concept is essentially floating cities, which can be done with technologies that we have. And there’s a certain movement from people That are trying to essentially create their own form of governance, living at sea completely sustainably off the grid, producing their own energy. If we were to extrapolate out a thought experiment from a city that’s floating at sea that’s also pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it, could that even be feasible?
Dr. David Goldberg: So is this a city at the surface of the sea or underwater?
Christophe Jospe: At the surface. Floating islands.
Dr. David Goldberg: Okay. It’s not an enclosed space where you’d have to manage your CO2.
Paul Gambill: No. Okay.
Dr. David Goldberg: So you would want to be producing energy for sure. I would assume alternative energies, renewables would be ideal for that. Certainly wind, 90% of the global wind energy is over the oceans. Depending on where you cited this, you could be very fortunate with wind.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. I think they’re also very interested in OTEC, ocean thermal energy conversion, hauling up cold water from the deep and then using the temperature differential to generate energy from that. And I think they get clean water out of it too, which is kind of a bonus.
Dr. David Goldberg: It’s a desalination process. Yeah. Yeah. So, all the sort of renewable style energies are viable. Geothermal, solar. Sure. Sure. Wind, I think, would be the light lift there because there’s so much wind and it’s mostly over the ocean and you’re there. So, there’d be a power plant, there’d be a renewable power plant and you would potentially have a lot of energy. So, the cost of capture, CO2 air capture now, It’s really just the cost of energy. So if you could have cheap energy that powered more than your floating island, you use just as we thought about it.
Maybe the first one would be in Kerguelen. Although I don’t think you have many people sign up for this. But if you had that power, you could scrub CO2 out of the air and then potentially... Pick a spot to store it. So you could simultaneously support a sustainable ecosystem. In theory, I didn’t read the book, but I suppose that’s what they’re getting at.
Ross Kenyon: Could be an income stream for them too.
Dr. David Goldberg: Yeah. Then you have energy. You could also take that CO2 that you’ve captured with renewable energy and convert it to fuel.
Ross Kenyon: Is that heresy in your line of work?
Dr. David Goldberg: No, I actually proposed it. Not so much as a mechanism in this Kirk Whalen concept. I thought it was a way to value what it would cost to make an equivalence on the cost of when the value of the fuel you could potentially produce equals the cost of doing the rest of the work. So it’s a way to say this is an equivalent value. If all the CO2 was converted to fuel, gives you a fuel cost and then, all right, for that amount of money, can I do it? This is a way of valuations trick more than anything.
Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: We have to start wrapping it up. Why don’t you leave us with what you’re working on, what we should expect from you next, what’s coming.
Dr. David Goldberg: All these things are still going and they’re going pretty well. I’d say that the research and the feasibility studies offshore are being pursued. We may or may not move on to another area and look at another location. So I think once you put an X on the map, it gets real. It gets real scientifically. It gets real in terms of where you might get CO2 from, how much it’ll cost, how much reaction, positive or negative, from the public, in terms of public acceptance there will be, the details of the reservoir, All the regulatory framework, all of it becomes real once you put an X on the map.
So we’re struggling with that, all those pieces in this one spot. We’ve had some initial discussions on the East Coast, similar formations offshore, and we’re working on some projects, more of a mixed project on the East Coast. But there are plenty of other locations. And Iceland is carrying on upscaling their work and have just added this idea a pilot air capture plant to their geothermal plant. And I think that’s a very... Very intriguing idea. So hopefully be involved in all those things.
Ross Kenyon: Great. That’s exciting. Well, thank you so much for being here with us, David. That was a lot of fun. Okay, good. We’re on time too.
