A team of scientists at the University of Edinburgh, in partnership with Carbfix – an Icelandic mineralisation operator – and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC), have earned £1 million to support their work. 

Their collaborative project, called Inclusion, received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council’s “Pushing the Frontiers” scheme for environmental science research. 

The partnership will look to develop methods for measuring the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) in volcanic rock. This process, known as “mineralisation” could be the key to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers. This harnesses the reactivity of basalt volcanic rock to change CO2 into new minerals, and isolates it underground.

With the funding, the team is set to use 4D x-ray imaging and micro-scale mineral analysis with a field-scale CO2 fingerprinting method to monitor the amount of CO2 captured from Iceland’s largest geothermal power plant to verify the safe and permanent storage of CO2 underground. 

The chemical fingerprint injected into the CO2 at the geothermal power plant will also give researchers data to help them understand how it evolves during the storage process.

“This will enable us to determine how, and how much, CO2 is stored and provide confidence in the amount of CO2 that can be stored by mineralisation in the future, which can also aid participation in carbon credit schemes,” said Professor Fin Stuart, director of the SUERC.

The project comes in the midst of ongoing global efforts to mitigate a climate disaster by advancing the capture of carbon dioxide, which accounts for 76% of greenhouse gases – the leading cause of climate change. 

The total greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the UK was recorded at the equivalent of roughly 417.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide last year, according to the UK Government. For context, one passenger vehicle will emit about 4.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide in a year.

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“This project will combine the state-of-the-art scientific laboratory facilities available in Scotland with the world’s leading CO2 mineralisation project to provide essential understanding of how to safely lock away CO2 in underground basalts,” said Dr Stuart Gilfillan, reader in Geochemistry at the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.

“We will also develop our understanding of the reactivity of basalt and other volcanic rock, to understand the potential of mineralisation in other parts of the world, such as Scotland.”