When it comes to climate change, the mining industry is typically seen as a ‘bad guy,’ depleting the Earth’s natural resources and emitting CO2 in the process. So you might be astounded to learn that carbon can actually be captured and stored using the waste produced in the mining process. Indeed the potential exists for scaling up this carbon capture process to remove billions of tons of CO2 per year—simply by recycling mining waste.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, here as always with Christophe Jospe. We’re on the campus of the University of British Columbia here with Dr. Greg Dippel. My understanding is he’s one of the main people working on mine tailings for carbon sequestration. Is that right? Carbon removal? I guess we’ll find out.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. From sitting right across from us is Greg. We’re looking at some gas analyzer that’s showing the CO2... In a little canister going down, I’m excited to learn about what all that’s about. It’s already too science-y for me. Yeah. Just looking at this thing. We’re going to keep this really simple. I got to know of Greg Dippel through working for Klaus Lackner and remember when I was still a grad student at Columbia when he came into the room and had a long... Hi, I’m Greg Dippel. I work at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
I’m a geologist and I’m trained in high temperature pressure geology, but for almost 15 years now I’ve been working in carbon capture and storage at Earth’s surface using the wastes of mining processes.
Ross Kenyon: This idea has always appealed to me when I first heard it because it seems like something that mining companies would really like. They don’t necessarily always get the best PR thought of in the most warm and cuddly kind of way, but they can do something that is actually quite powerful and good and also just makes them more profitable potentially. So you’re you’re explaining to us a little bit about how this might work.
Dr. Greg Dipple: We’re looking at a specific type of mine, so it’s not all mine sites, but commodities that are hosted in a certain rock type called an ultramafic rock. Common commodities in that cycle would be platinum or platinum group elements, nickel and diamonds would all be examples of the kinds of mines that might be hosted in the rock type that we work on. And we work on that rock type because that rock type typically forms at depth within the earth out of chemical equilibrium with the atmosphere. So it’s inherently reactive to air.
And that means it’s very reactive to concentrated CO2 like you might get in a flue gas from a power plant, for example. So we take advantage of both of those routes.
Ross Kenyon: So say you have a platinum mine and they’re pulling out lots of stuff out of the mine that isn’t just the valuable commodity that they’re after. And that waste product is very reactive and can absorb CO2. Yes, that’s correct. That’s right. I did it. I got the science.
Christophe Jospe: There we go. You went for it. You went for the juggler. Real technical. I’d like to take a step back. Let’s talk about mining. Let’s talk about the supply chain of mines, how mines originate, what sort of decisions mining companies need to make. And How does it relate to what you do? That’s a good question.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Mining is a very long-term, big investment industry. So it’s a very conservative industry. So it’s not unusual for there to be probably 50 years from discovery to the opening of a mine in many areas. And the investments are in the billions of dollars. And in most instances, or many instances anyways, the expectation is that the mine will be active for a number of years to pay off that initial investment and then generate revenue for the company. So they tend to be Compared to a lot of other industries, relatively slow at adopting new technology because of the risk factor associated with that.
Christophe Jospe: Right. And so if I’m plonking down billions of dollars for a certain thing, I’m going to want my billions of dollars for that thing and don’t have the time to iterate to improve the next thing where I might have spent millions of dollars.
Ross Kenyon: And the profitability of mines is very volatile, is it not? So if they were able to monetize their carbon removal, this might provide them like a nice baseline potentially.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Yeah. You know, I think the value on the carbon side, the value for the companies is reputational, is also definitely financial. Yeah, those are probably the two main ones that I see when I’m talking to mining companies. But I think the environment around the value of carbon has been so volatile. Probably more volatile than the actual resource sector, actually, that the interest from that side of things has come and gone. And even within Canada, where we’re, you know, British Columbia, we’re already at $30 a ton here now, and we’ll be to $50 within a few years.
And even companies working in this This environment that I’m talking to today, in many instances, they’re at least as interested in some of the other aspects of the carbon sequestration rather than the pure financial one, but they’re coming to a realization of the value of that in the longer term. There are a lot of co-benefits associated with storing CO2 in the mine tailings that can also help their bottom line in other ways.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we love stuff like that. If you can not necessarily rely fully on their altruism, but you’re able to make sure that they not only have the reputational effect, but they’re also able to make sure that they’re making enough money to cover them, isolate them from some of the risk and the volatility of the commodities markets. I think it seems like an easy sale too. You go there and they’re just like, what’s the catch? There’s something, right? Yeah.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Because it sounds a little too easy. Well, I bring examples into the room when I talk to them because it’s maybe a little bit unbelievable when you first hear it, this idea that we’re going to take mine waste and store carbon in it and generate other value as well. So, you know, I think that some of the other values around stabilizing the waste and mitigating dust and things like that get us in the door. I was in a conversation on Friday with some people from industry and they were asking, so, you know, so how do we actually monetize this in operations?
Because it’s not clear, you know, carbon trading markets are very disconnected. They don’t have a clear understanding of the actual path by which they would monetize carbon sequestration if they were to do it.
Ross Kenyon: You told them about Nori, right?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Absolutely. I said blockchain and their eyes glazed over a bit tonight.
Christophe Jospe: So, I’m still interested. I’m a miner. I dig. I get the stuff I want out of the ground. And there’s residue left behind. And that’s the tailing, right? And tailings can give off dust. We maybe put those in pools or water. Talk to us about tailings and maybe even define that for our listeners. Ross and I are big on definitions here.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Right. Oh, yeah. We’ll make you define stuff whenever we hear it. Of course. For most mines, the metal mines that we’re talking to are diamond mines, the thing that they extract for value would typically be much less than 1% of the rock. In essence, 99. 9% of what is mined is waste. And that material comes out in, generally speaking, two different waste streams. Waste rock would be material that hasn’t been crushed to remove valuable products. So that’s rock that had to be removed in order to build the mine, to get access to the valuable stuff, but doesn’t have enough valuable stuff in it to The material that’s actually gone through a processing circuit and been crushed and had the valuable material removed is called tailings because it comes out the tail of the industrial process.
And that will be rock that’s been finely ground and treated in various ways to extract the metals or diamonds. And because it’s finely ground, it’s much more reactive than the rock was when it was in the ground. And so if you just look at it from a surface area perspective, the amount of surface within, say, one ton of rock is It wouldn’t be unusual to increase that by a factor of a million by extracting the rock and crushing it and exposing it at the surface. And so what we find is that reactions that we normally think of as happening over a million years happen within less than a year because we’ve increased that surface area so much as part of the mining process.
Ross Kenyon: So what would you do with tailings once you got them? How do you get the carbon into it? And do you put them somewhere once it’s carbonated?
Dr. Greg Dipple: So typically a mine will put them in a tailing storage facility and those can take many forms, some of which are very well suited to allow for reaction between the tailings and air such that you could sequester carbon and many of them are designed in a way that... So one of the things that we work with with mining companies to try and explore how they can not necessarily deploy new technology, but just change the way that mines are designed and built in such a way that they maximize the potential for there to be reaction between CO2 and the tailings material so they can get larger uptake of CO2.
Ross Kenyon: What might that look like? You have a little, it’s a little tube. What is it? What exactly is this thing? We’ll put a picture up in the notes.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Yeah. So we have a core of material here that was tailings material that’s been treated with a simplistic version of a flue gas, of a gas that might come out of a power plant. And we use something that’s 10% CO2 and 90% nitrogen. Which is kind of in between what you might get from say a natural gas plant versus a coal burning plant or a diesel. Which would all be examples of the ways that remote mines might generate power. And at 10% CO2 we expose this sand, damp sand, essentially to 10% CO2 for three weeks.
And we generate cores of material that have strengths that can approach and even exceed that of construction cement. So we start to essentially stabilize this waste material. That has value for the safety of the site after the mine is closed and remediated. And it has value in building infrastructure. It might change the way that they actually design their tailing storage facilities in a way that makes them safer, more energy efficient, and also less expensive. So it brings the mine value from a number of fronts.
Ross Kenyon: This might be a silly question, but when you’re saying cement, could you actually turn this into a building product, building material? Some people are doing that.
Dr. Greg Dipple: So, we find that the reactivity even within an individual rock body is highly variable and we’ve taken material that is the most reactive and in seven weeks at room temperature in our laboratory, we’ve created material that has a compressive strength of 4,000 pounds per square inch, which is basically high strength construction cement. So we’ve created materials that would be stronger than the average ready mix that you’d get out of the cement truck you might see on the city street. That’s in a highly optimized environment using the most reactive materials. You know, one of the ways you can use this is you could, for regulatory reasons, you might need to build your dams in more conventional ways, tailings dams, to hold back material.
But if you were to buttress them with CO-treated tailings, you’re probably going to create a much stronger and safer environment. And for seismically active areas like British Columbia, that’s of real interest to the mining community.
Ross Kenyon: This stuff gets me really excited whenever you can turn the waste product of either mine tailings or even of carbon dioxide and you can make something that’s better than what exists and is more profitable or stronger, etc. That seems like the way to address climate change is you’re marrying those impulses together, right? Absolutely. I shouldn’t get too excited. Should I be that excited? Is it far in the future?
Christophe Jospe: Is it coming next week? I mean, I got excited. I was watching a four hour long video. I don’t know how many people in the world would want to watch a four hour long video by the National Academies of Science. But I listened to Greg, who is one of the presenters. And he got up there and said, hey, we can do this for $10 a ton, which is a pretty bold statement. And that got me excited. But keep me excited, Greg. How do you get there?
Dr. Greg Dipple: There’s no new technology really involved in doing this. So we’re not looking at changing technology. We’re using existing technology and existing processes and modifying them. So we feel that there will be low cost and relatively fast tracks to deploying these approaches. The $10 a ton number comes from looking at, so we’ve just started to develop a framework in which to assess how reactive tailings are. So it’s something that You can’t go out there and look at dozens or hundreds of years of characterizing rock for the purpose of mining and actually find out how reactive to CO2 they are.
So we’re developing essentially a framework in which to assess that reactivity. And in the process of doing that, we found that the reactivity of rocks is highly variable even within individual deposits. And where we’ve characterized that within an individual deposit, we find there’s a tail of highly reactive material. It might only be 5% of the deposit, but it’s incredibly reactive. And so, if we assume that curve from a single deposit of, say, a billion tonnes of rock, if we assume that same distribution is broadly representative of rocks as a whole...
Then that implies that there’s billions and billions of tonnes of highly reactive rock at the Earth’s surface based on the abundance of these rock types globally. So that means you could find those most reactive materials and they would be so reactive that using existing mine technology, you could offset all of the CO2 emissions associated with mining. And if we use industry standard sort of $10 a ton cost for mining, for large mining operation, we can essentially then invert the We got to cover that $10 a ton cost. What would the price of carbon have to be to cover that?
For these most reactive materials, if you do that mathematics and assume that you recover a little bit of metal, say nickel, maybe $5 a ton, you could quickly find that there should be parts of the Earth’s crust where you could essentially do billions of tonnes of CO2 per year at a cost of $10 or $20 a ton, if we could find those deposits.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re monetizing it too, you might not even have to be looking for these valuable minerals. You might just be able to go after this reactive mineral. Is that correct?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Yeah. I mean, what we did was we said, if it’s $10 a ton, let’s assume we can get $5 a ton out of it because the $10 a ton cost is actually the cost not only of mining the rock, but of also processing it to remove the metals. So you can say, well, if we don’t process it to remove the metals, maybe the cost is less than $10 a ton, or we will process it and we’ll get the metals and that’ll offset our costs. So again, it’s a very early days back of the envelope calculation.
But the point is, it’s not $200 a ton or $100 a ton. It’s definitely in the tens of dollars per ton range. And here in British Columbia, we’re already at $30 a ton carbon tax. So that’s an approach that could have value in the current carbon and climate, certainly within British Columbia.
Christophe Jospe: What I really like about this is in a way you are piggybacking off of the work of someone else because, hey, we need to mine already to get these minerals. Someone is already doing the crushing and grinding of the rock and putting these rocks in the highly reactive form where then you can come in and say, well, let’s just tweak a little bit and now actually have these rocks carbonate. It seems like at some point there must have been a eureka moment in your career where you figured all this out.
How did you get started?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Actually, a colleague from Quebec we started back in the mid-90s, I guess. We first thought, well, there was a lot of talk about mining ultramafic rock for the purposes of carbon sequestration. And so we know there’s billions of tonnes of mined ultramafic rock already in various places around the world. Let’s just start characterizing those wastes and see if they would be appropriate for a chemical plant for the purposes of carbon sequestration because that would reduce your cost if you could set that plant up in a place where the mining had already been done and what we found for every And the reason that we went to is that as we were characterizing the material to see if it was the right kind of minerals, we kept finding carbonate minerals within the tailings and they were cementing together the grains of the ground material.
So it became obvious pretty quickly. Accidentally, we discovered that these materials are actually reacting with air. We don’t need to put them in a high temperature pressure reactor in a pure CO2 stream in order to carbonate them. They’re reacting at a very slow rate already. And so that then changed the focus to a number of field studies. But first in abandoned mines and then active mines where we did baseline studies trying to understand what is the rate by which these reactions are happening and what is limiting the amount of reaction.
And the outcome of those studies, which was the first sort of five or six years of work from mines in Canada and Australia, the outcome was that what’s limiting the reaction is the availability of CO2. And that flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom, which would have been that the reactivity of the mineral grains should be rate limiting. So once we found out we were CO2 limited, that completely changed the whole process to one of providing CO2 rather than increasing reactivity to begin with. And that was kind of probably the eureka moment once we realized that, yeah, okay, it’s happening, that’s interesting, it’s happening, and it’s actually limited by availability to CO2.
If you’re going to do CO2 sequestration, the simplest problem you have is access to CO2. So the guy woke up in the middle of the night and said, holy cow.
Ross Kenyon: So you need it to be in a concentrated CO2 environment. Just like exposing it to the air is not going to work that well. It’s actually flowing air.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Putting a fan over top of a tailings pile would increase the rate. So you could blow air. Blowing air would increase rates. Maybe not orders of magnitude, but not by a factor of 10. We do experiments like one I’ve got running on the table beside me here where we look at the drawdown of CO2 from room air. We normally will have a surface that’s smooth. If we take that surface and we roughen it the way it might be if you say tilled your garden, we find that the rate is doubled.
So if we till the surface of the tailings creating more surface area of the reactive minerals, the rate doubles in the laboratory and that’s drawdown from air. So some of the things we can do, they’re modest improvements, but they’re definitely not high technology. You’re talking about running machinery over the top of tailings piles and increasing surface area, for example.
Christophe Jospe: So not all mines are created equal, not all tailings are created equal. My very superficial understanding of mine tailings is that sometimes the mining companies have to deal with some really toxic wastes, and that might be their main concern. And here you’re coming and saying, no, no, no, we can spread the surface area around just a little bit more and make these small tweaks. How much do you run up against safety concerns? And how much does that vary by mine to mine? It varies a lot mine to mine.
Dr. Greg Dipple: At one level, the simplest way to make this faster would be to spread your tailings very thin over large, large, large areas. But realistically, that’s not feasible. So rather than creating accessibility of the tailings to gas by spreading it out, we look at moving gas. In some ways, moving gas is less expensive than moving rock, and so it can make more sense as well. So, you know, we’re looking at what can you do without dramatically increasing the footprint of a mine, what can you do to increase those reaction rates substantially?
By moving air or by making the initial deposition of the tailings in a way that makes it more accessible to gas flow, that alone will give you a significant advantage. But there’s also ways if you have a power plant on site, which is often the case, then you have a point source of CO2. So for a mine, typically... Half of the total greenhouse gas emissions of a mine might be related to energy intensive stuff where you need power. So crushing rock and things like that. If you’re generating that power on site through, say, a natural gas power plant, you’ve got a point source of CO2 that might be 50% of your overall emissions.
The other roughly 50% would be things like trucks that are dispersed and you’re not going to easily capture that CO2 directly. So if you want to make a mine greenhouse gas neutral or go beyond that, you want to do a combination of capturing from air to offset things like truck emissions as well as make use of any point sources of CO2. And if you have a point source of CO2, you might be able to use that in your mine operations. Trying to mimic what would happen if you injected your power plant flue gas into a tailings pipeline as the tailings is pumped say 10 kilometers from the process plant to the tailings storage facility.
It might be in that pipeline for 20 minutes. Can we get a lot of reaction between the minerals and the flue gas in that 20 minutes that it’s in this wonderfully stirred slurry pipeline and use that as a way to get more contact time between CO2 and minerals?
Ross Kenyon: Where are we right now with this? You have partners that you’re working with, you’re doing experiments on it. What are you doing now and how far in the future might we expect this to be maybe the norm?
Dr. Greg Dipple: I think the landscape has changed a lot in the last two years from the carbon side of things, and we’ve seen that in the mining industry as well. So we’ve gone from doing mostly laboratory, experimental, and numerical modeling approaches over a number of years to starting to get active partnerships with mining companies now just in the last year. So we’re working with three different mining companies right now between nickel and diamond. And they’re all interested in getting things out in the field. So right now we’re doing baseline studies so we understand what’s happening at some of these mine sites.
And the idea is then to take some of the approaches we’ve developed in the lab and start to deploy them in the field at an active mine site, hopefully in 2019.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. So talk to us a little bit about scale. Probably best to split both copper and diamond, so we’ll talk about each. But how big is the mine? How much carbon could you store in a typical mine? How long does this go on for? What does your pilot study look like and how do you scale that up? Yeah, the earlier questions are easier.
Dr. Greg Dipple: A large mine might process 20 million tonnes of rock a year. And that would produce maybe if it’s got a power plant on site, it would be producing less than a million tonnes of CO2 a year to do that. And is this a copper or diamond mine? It’s not that. That’s dependent on commodity. It’s more dependent on how the mine’s designed and the size of the mine. So, a small diamond mine or a small nickel mine might be more similar in footprint versus a large diamond and a large nickel. I used to think of commodity as going with size, but that’s not necessarily the case.
There’s some fairly significant diamond mines in Botswana, for example, that operate at a very large scale. So... So one of these mines might produce, say, 700,000, just under a million tonnes of CO2 per year in terms of CO2 equivalent as greenhouse gas. The total capacity of their waste would be on the order of a billion. So typically a mine will produce a capacity that’s 10 times greater than its emissions as a back of the envelope calculation for these ultramafic rocks. Now only a fraction of all that billion will be easily reacted.
So we kind of look at the capacity of mine tailings to react and we put it in two categories. So labile component, we call it, something that happens easily, and then something that’s very difficult to extract. And right now, because we’re thinking about approaches that can do stuff at tens of dollars a ton, we only look at the labile component or the easily extracted. Magnesium, which is what’s used to bind with CO2. And so the labile magnesium content of a mine might be 10% of their total amount. It might be 5% of their total amount.
If it’s 10%, then they can be greenhouse gas neutral by just reacting the most highly reactive parts of their tailings.
Ross Kenyon: There are clearly some deposits and operations out there that have a labile component that probably exceeds their emissions.
Dr. Greg Dipple: So I think that It should be relatively straightforward if you build it using existing technology that we can get to the point of having large mining operations that are greenhouse gas neutral or ultimately have a negative greenhouse gas aspect, which can then be, I think if you look at it from a societal point of view, you’re still creating an environmental issue around creating a mine. Everything we do as humans at a large industrial scale has an environmental impact. But can you actually help to mitigate or even offset that local environmental impact by having a larger environmental benefit, which is tackling climate change?
Ross Kenyon: And is there any infrastructure in place besides what we’re working on to monetize this carbon removal that they might be doing?
Dr. Greg Dipple: The closest I get to that is on the verification side. We’re currently working on hopefully making BC one of the first jurisdictions in the world. It would be our goal, but get a jurisdiction that actually formally recognizes carbon sequestration in mine tailings as a verifiable and counted way of sequestering carbon. So that to me is the first step that we haven’t gotten past that to the monetization.
Ross Kenyon: So are you deep in IoT right now? Are you looking at devices and are you designing them? Are you consulting on them?
Christophe Jospe: Sorry, what’s IoT, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Internet of Things, just smart devices that are connected to a larger network. Is that a pretty fair short summary? Yeah, okay.
Dr. Greg Dipple: My exposure, which has only been over the last couple of years, is that the development of the verification protocol is pretty technology agnostic. So there’s a part of it which is just kind of at a high level explaining what kind of things would have to be demonstrated in order for it to be verifiable. And then the other part of that is how do you actually go about making the measurements to demonstrate that and making them in a way that’s arm’s length and reliable and affordable? Because the way that we first documented the rates of carbon sequestration in active mines was, you know, One PhD per mindset, which is not going to be feasible in the real world.
So we’re certainly looking at one of the reasons we do little experiments with these little CO2 sensors is helping us understand new ways of providing the data which would allow verification. But the verification protocols are at one level are fairly technology agnostic. They worry more about the outcomes than rather the technology that then allows them to stand as the technology evolves. Our approach into how one would Verify carbon sequestration, I would say, has changed dramatically over the last five years or so. And I’m quite confident there’s going to be relatively robust, simple, and affordable ways to collect the data that are going to be needed to demonstrate that the carbon that’s sequestered is truly there in a safe way, in a permanent way from human timescales stored over geologic time that would make it, I think, valuable carbon from the perspective of monetizing it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And the promise of IoT, as I understand it, is that verification is a little bit of a wet system now where it requires a lot of human input into the system. And the more dry the system can be, the less potential there is for people to fudge inputs. And if you can automate that, it might just be easier. And we’re on the cusp of it and people are figuring it out. I don’t know if we’ll ever get fully away from the wet system elements of this, but that’s the hope, at least as I understand it.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I’m not going to let you off the hook on my scale question. Let’s take you out of the lab into the mine. How big are we getting?
Dr. Greg Dipple: If you just look at the current rate of mining of the commodities that have the right host rocks, if you carbonated... All of their waste. Opened up new mines based on their potential to sequester carbon, perhaps in addition to develop commodities or just for the purposes of sequestering carbon, then it would be easy to get into the billions of tonnes per year based on our idea of projecting our understanding of small individual bodies of, say, Billions of tonnes of carbon a year removed?
Ross Kenyon: CO2 per year. CO2, yes.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Divide by three for carbon. But yeah, billions of tonnes of CO2 per year. There’s that capacity. The right kind of rocks likely exist on Earth’s surface such that you could mine and sequester carbon at that rate if you chose to do so. That opens up that huge question about is mining the lesser evil than climate change? That’s going to be a very important discussion that has to be made because you would be talking about mining at a significant scale.
Ross Kenyon: Much more than we are doing now.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Well, much more than we’re doing in Ultramafic Rocks, which admittedly is a tiny fraction of total global mining. The big, big mines in the world are coal and porphyry copper and things like that are huge mines. I’ve never done the back of the envelope calculation to expand it to the whole mining industry. The mining industry is a lot smaller than the oil and gas industry globally. If you’re going to solve a problem created by the oil and gas industry, you’re going to have to do it with an industry that’s as big as the oil and gas industry would be my off-the-cuff answer.
What competes with that? Construction. There’s very few things that compete with that scale.
Christophe Jospe: So we were in your lab earlier before this podcast and my ears perked up when you started talking about a glove box that can handle asbestos, I remember. I stuck my head in there, was that okay? As long as you didn’t breathe. You didn’t, right? But I remember learning at some point that CO2 can actually neutralize some asbestos problems, which to me also seems like another win-win. Is your work at all related to that?
Dr. Greg Dipple: It is. I think that’s a simple idea and demonstrating it is going to be a challenge. I think you can do that in a number of ways. If you’re just essentially encapsulating and suppressing dust formation from existing asbestos piles like you would have in around old asbestos mines, then that is probably relatively straightforward because you’re just going to reduce the amount of dust creation there. But that’s really going to impact old mine sites. If you’re going to use this to actually process asbestos waste from home renovation and things like that, you know, you either have to destroy it or you have to modify the surface property such that it no longer has that adverse health impact.
There’s been a little bit of work done on changing how the surfaces of asbestos might be changed by reaction with CO2, but I think we’re a long way from actually being able to determine if could we actually take asbestos and make it non-toxic by modifying its surface properties through a process that also sequestered carbon. That remains an intriguing idea that is very far from having been tested in a meaningful way that I’m aware of.
Ross Kenyon: Those trial lawyers are not going to like you if you pull that off. I see those commercials growing up of the, do you or a loved one have mesothelioma? That’s asbestos, right?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Okay, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Nice one.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Well, but then to completely destroy, consume the asbestos fibers, it’s very doable, but probably that’s a technology that’s, you know, hundreds of dollars a ton of CO2, not There’s a whole range of ways that you can do this. And if you want to spend $200 a ton to sequester carbon, you can get very aggressive results out of it. And you probably could destroy asbestos with those approaches. But we’re focused right now on what we can do at today’s carbon prices because we think that’s an important first step towards getting to those other things ultimately.
Christophe Jospe: So I’m curious, we come across many flavors of environmentalists and Greg, I’m going to call you an environmentalist as well. But some people might not because they’re saying, well, you’re advancing mining and mining is bad. What do you have to say to them? And can you allay our fears?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Well, I’ve had some pretty heated discussions in that space. And I think it is a matter of perspective. There are people at both extremes that will never convince of anything. So I’m not too interested in those conversations, I guess, in terms of moving forward anyways. But I think if we can come up with, you know, how do we approach this in a way that where all the accounting and the impacts are looked at in a balanced, fair, and complete way, then we should be able to make the decisions we need to make about how are we going to deal with the climate change problem.
Because again, the only way we’re going to deal with it is by doing things at a scale commensurate with the oil and gas industry globally. That’s going to be a huge activity. So there’s no way around that, really.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And Nori, you know, we are very agnostic to any one approach. From our perspective, we see the climate change problem as an issue of there being too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And we want to make it as easy as possible for others to pay others to remove that carbon from the atmosphere.
Ross Kenyon: So that they don’t have to sacrifice either. Like I still want the minerals that go into my iPhone, but I’m happy to like pay for the waste products that I created in the process. I don’t want to not have an iPhone or something.
Christophe Jospe: And tangentially, I’d even feel better if I knew where those minerals came from and if they were conflict free.
Ross Kenyon: I got married in August and the engagement ring I got my wife, it was like super important that it was conflict free. That was like the top priority. And so, yeah, obviously I’d rather give my money to them than other places.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, I guess where I was going with that question, it’s a portfolio approach. There are a whole lot of solutions and you are one piece of that puzzle. But you also have to deal with maybe some backlash where people might say, oh, well, you’re putting a new mine, this might create water issues in a local environment, or this might create these other toxicities. Is that true? And to what extent can that be mitigated?
Dr. Greg Dipple: All of those impacts are issues depending on where you are. Some mine sites, the problem is too much water. If you’re operating a mine in BC, you have to treat any rain that falls on disturbed land. So if you’re in a high rainfall environment, your problem is that you’re treating a lot of rainfall that’s fallen on disturbed land. And in other environments, like Western Australia, the problem is that there’s not enough water around and you’re using water for your mine operation. So absolutely, but it’s highly variable. It goes from one extreme to another.
The mining... Industry of today is very different from the mining industry of the past. There’s still good players and bad players, absolutely, as in within any industry. But I think it’s probably the most extreme environment I’ve worked in is the diamond mines that operate in the Canadian Arctic are under incredibly strict environmental controls. I was shocked at the controls that are in place there because they’re in such a sensitive environment in the Canadian Arctic. I remember working in tailings storage facility doing the fieldwork to do these baseline studies to understand what’s happening naturally and we’re in a large area of crushed rock that’s been treated and they even put their treated sewage into I just got a funny image of my head of miners like peeing in a bottle in the mines.
Christophe Jospe: It’s kind of like what it was. Did I just figure you out?
Dr. Greg Dipple: You just stopped drinking coffee in the morning. Let’s put it that way. Because you feel really bad calling, you know, these people are working in the high Arctic and it costs the mine a lot of money for every person who’s up there working. You feel very guilty calling them up on the walkie-talkie saying, can you come pick me up because I have to pee. Like, oh, a little scientist, man.
Christophe Jospe: Get out of the bathroom. Get out of the mine. So, we’re talking about storing carbon and rock. You can either get it directly from the ambient air, you can get it from a power plant at the mine, or you can get it from A machine that is at the mine pulling carbon out of the air because the carbon dioxide because you don’t have a source of carbon dioxide. I’d imagine each one of those might look a little bit differently in the sort of step function, this ideal world of scaling the technologies that we’re talking about.
Can you go into a little bit about how you see all that playing out?
Dr. Greg Dipple: Yeah, I mean, so one of the neat things about these kinds of mine tailings is they inherently are capable of doing direct capture from air. But the rate at which they do it is pretty modest compared to some of the new technologies that are being developed to do direct air capture. And so I think if you were at a remote If you’re in a remote area generating power to get a point source of CO2, you may have I think your inherent ability to capture from air is going to be real, significant, but limited.
And your ability to either access or generate point sources of CO2 is going to be very limited in many of these instances. And that, to me, is a perfect example of when you would want to marry You know, direct air capture technologies with the ability to store and utilize the carbon within a mine operation.
Christophe Jospe: Great. So here we are sitting in your office talking. We actually hate to talk. We’re very action oriented. We hope that a year from now, we’re not sitting in your office talking, but things are happening. I want to be radioing a miner to pick me up to go pee. That’s what I want to be doing in a year. But the point is, a lot needs to happen. A lot needs to happen quickly if we’re collectively serious about addressing this climate change problem because the greenhouse gases keep accumulating in the atmosphere.
So let’s go as fast as possible. What needs to happen? Where does the money need to go? What research needs to get funded? Who needs to work with each other? Let’s go.
Dr. Greg Dipple: Good question. We’re in the process, I think, of trying to figure that out. What we need is to take the things that we’ve been doing in the lab and the models we’ve been developing over the last, you know, we had about an eight-year period where everything we did was lab-based because we didn’t have access to industrial partners because of the state of the carbon economy and the state of the resource sector. So the table has just flipped in the last 18, 24 months to where both the resource sector is rebounding and they have an ability to do stuff and people’s sensitivity around carbon and the view of the inevitability of their being is Carbon limited economy or carbon economy have changed.
And so we’re just getting to the point where we have the opportunity there and we need to deploy these things in the field and get an understanding of the possible reactivity of different types of mine tailings. So we need to look at a lot of sites and then pick the best ones to make sure that our first attempts at doing this in the field at large scale are successful. Because if they’re not successful, it’s going to have a huge negative impact on our ability to try again.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I always like the metaphor. You have a limited number of bullets and you want to make sure you use them wisely. Not sure we’ll get three strikes. So another question that sort of comes to mind then, well, you’re working with partners who it seems like they’re starting to realize that they’re becoming carbon constrained and actually having the ability to deal with the own waste that they generate. And even someone else’s waste is a real value proposition for them. Is that true? And that wasn’t true a couple of years ago?
Yep.
Dr. Greg Dipple: I would say it was true 12 years ago. And it’s true now, but in many of the intervening years, it wasn’t. In 2006, 2007, there was probably a lot more interest in carbon sequestration in the industrial sector than there was in many of the intervening years. But that certainly has flipped back around again. The companies, I think they see it from the financial standpoint, they see it from the co-benefit standpoint, and they also see it from an environmental impact standpoint. So I think all of those are important drivers to varying degrees within individual companies.
My initial view on this, and I haven’t really thought about it given what’s happening. The mine companies would be too risk averse to take this on themselves, but they, you know, lease your tailings pile for a set fee. There’s no risk to us. And then the entrepreneurs and the risk takers would be new companies that would be formed that would come in and set these operations up. So I wanted to get in a little bit onto the carbon accounting side of mine tailings. How can we be sure that the carbon is actually there?
We’ve got PhD students today, and we want to figure out how to make that more scalable in the future. So the way that we did this initially was using a technique called x-ray diffraction to measure the actual abundance of specific mineral types, not carbonate minerals in general, but the carbonate minerals that sequester CO2 and tailings are a certain type of mineral and they can be distinguished on the basis of how they diffract x-rays. And so we would use quantitative x-ray diffraction work to actually measure the amount of those minerals within individual samples.
We would go out to a tailings facility. We actually had a blue tarp that we would lay out that had holes at set intervals so that we would take cores that were blind to what was happening in the subsurface. We had to sample at discrete depth intervals, collected many, many hundreds of samples, and then randomly chose about 250 from those to actually make measurements from with the idea that the measurements we took would be blind to any of our biases as geologists and would hopefully be statistically relevant to the deposit as a whole.
So we took that approach, we measured the actual amount of those minerals, and then we used a three isotope system to actually fingerprint all of the sources of carbon within the operation, including carbon coming from the mined rock, all the additives that were used in the industrial process, the treated sewage, as well as air. And then by using a multiple isotope system to fingerprint the CO2, we could actually figure out how much of the bound CO2 actually came out. And on that basis, we’ve come up with the numbers. So that is well published and well established in the scientific literature.
So that one is very, very rigorous and probably meets or surpasses almost any reasonable expectation for demonstration for verification purposes. What we need to do is find ways to get those same measurements in a way that’s less intense in terms of the labor involved and the cost. We’ve got that one example. We’re looking at using those types of approaches as baselines and seeing if we can get the same numbers using other approaches that are much easier, much faster. It took two years to collect all the data to do that verification.
So we want to develop other techniques that can be built upon that fairly rigorous scientific approach. And that would include both measuring drawdown of CO2 in the air above a tailing storage facility, as well as other less expensive and simpler ways of analyzing the tailing material themselves. So you’d still do the coring and take samples, but make measurements that are much faster and less labor intensive and less expensive to get out the same numbers. You’d essentially have a range of technologies that you would use, lots of the easy stuff and less of the hard stuff and less of the really hard stuff, and try and put them together in a framework that really allows you to show that the broadest measurements that you’ve taken are representative by underpinning them with a smaller number of much more rigorous measurements.
Christophe Jospe: Fascinating. Yeah. And we’ll link those articles in the show notes for our listeners who want to learn a little bit more. It brings to mind though, something you brought up earlier, that there’s high variability in different pieces of the mind. So do you actually have to do that core sampling all over everywhere? Or can you take a statistical analysis and then make determinations based on that? It remains to be seen.
Ross Kenyon: Statistics was never my strong point. Yeah.
Dr. Greg Dipple: The level of rigor that we did in the early days, I think we’re building more and more confidence that we don’t need to go through the extent that we did previously in order to get these measurements done. I’m quite confident that new technological approaches are going to allow us to do this in a way that’s strongly supported by science, but doable and a realistic timeframe at a reasonable cost.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Well, that’s all I got, Ross. Do you have anything else?
Ross Kenyon: No, no, it was super interesting. Thanks for being here, Greg. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.
