CarbFix, a pilot program at Iceland’s Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Station, seeks to tackle climate change by injecting greenhouse gasses into the ground for permanent storage.
HENGILL, Iceland — In a cramped work trailer not far from Iceland’s largest geothermal power plant, a researcher pored over a box of core samples — cylinders of rock that a drilling rig had pulled from deep underground just a few minutes before.
In a test that began in 2012, scientists had injected hundreds of tons of water and carbon dioxide gas 1,500 feet down into layers of porous basaltic rock, the product of ancient lava flows from the nearby Hengill volcano. Now the researcher, Sandra Snaebjornsdottir, a doctoral student at the University of Iceland, was looking for signs that the CO2 had combined with elements in the basalt and become calcite, a solid crystalline mineral.
In short, she wanted to see if the gas had turned to stone.
“We have some calcites here,” she said, pointing to a smattering of white particles in the otherwise dark gray rock samples. “We might want to take a better look at them later.”
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And given that the economics of carbon storage are already poor, it is difficult to see many companies taking on the added expense of injecting water, too.
“If you’re looking at it from the point of view of, ‘Would a fossil-fuel power plant choose to sequester CO2 by carbonating water?’ — no, that doesn’t make any sense,” said Elizabeth Burton, general manager for the Americas of the Global CCS Institute. But if the plant has to re-inject wastewater anyway, “maybe the economics would work out,” she said.
Dr. Matter and the other CarbFix scientists are confident that mineralization will be an answer, at least for some efforts to fight climate change.
“The problem is big enough,” Dr. Matter said. “We need many solutions.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Burying a Mountain of CO 2 . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
