12/19/2025
Today, the December 19, 2025 GMCS Seminar featured, Benjamin Tutolo, University of Calgary, will present, "Strategies for overcoming the challenge of gigaton-per-year basalt carbonation."
For more information on upcoming GMCS events and research activities, visit our website, and you can view the GMCS Seminars here: https://gmcs.umn.edu/events
Abstract
Basalt carbonation has gained traction as a large-capacity technique to manage atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and potentially avoid the most dramatic impacts of climate change. Yet, while several successful injection operations have demonstrated the efficacy of this technique at the scale of thousands of tons of CO2 injected per year, achieving the necessary impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations will require expansion to the gigaton-per-year scale. However, implementing basalt carbonation at this scale will face important geochemical and hydrogeological challenges. At the gigaton-per-year scale, maximizing per-well CO2 injection rates will likely involve injecting CO2 in a supercritical, rather than dissolved, state, which will, in turn, lead to less efficient basalt carbonation. Alternative injection strategies, including Water-Alternating-Gas injection, may combat this challenge by enhancing in-situ CO2 dissolution. Acid pretreatment may also enhance permeability and facilitate cation extraction from basalt prior to, or alongside, CO2 injection, but this involves complex cost-benefit analyses. In any case, sub-optimal – in terms of lower reactivity, and non-ideal permeability and porosity – basaltic aquifers will need to be exploited to help us achieve gigaton-scale basalt carbonation. In this presentation, I will outline our recent efforts to examine these aspects of basalt carbonation using a combined experimental and reactive transport modeling approach. Ultimately, our ongoing work indicates that achieving the substantial promise of basalt carbonation as a climate change solution will require innovative solutions to a wide variety of challenges not generally investigated in existing laboratory and field-scale studies.
