The concept of sequestering carbon dioxide underground is not a new one but it may play a much bigger role in the future. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon capture will almost certainly be needed as part of a swathe of strategies aimed at reducing environmental CO2 and hence limiting greenhouse gas induced climate change. Now several companies are figuring out how to lock up the gas forever. Only a few locations globally are suitable and the economics don’t yet make sense. But that has not discouraged investments from some big players.
Permanently mineralising CO2 is a relatively straightforward procedure involving drilling a very deep hole and injecting the gas in solution. There are several ways to approach this, but one of the most promising involves tapping underground locations containing a mineral called peridotite. Injecting the gas and water mix produces calcite, another naturally occurring and stable mineral. Peridotites are “ultra-mafic” (iron and magnesium rich) rocks normally found on the ocean floor near plate boundaries. But sometimes a tectonic process called “obduction” (over millions of years) pushes the rocks out of the ocean and smashes them into the continental crustal rock above.
One of the richest accessible fields of peridotite can be found near the border of Oman and United Arab Emirates. Fortuitously, there is a rather considerable amount of expertise available in this region for the drilling of deep holes. Established in Oman in 2020, a startup called 44.01 is getting close to activating the first commercial sequestration operation within a peridotite field. Named in honour of the atomic weight of CO2, the company won the top award in the Earthshot Prize in 2022. The prize money was deployed for further research and development, scaling the technology and to explore an additional site over in the Emirates, in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi state oil company ADNOC.
Following in the footsteps of early innovators such as Icelandic firm Carbfix, company founder Talal Hasan says that the 44.01 value proposition primarily revolves around the injection process. The company plans to work with others already involved in direct air capture. But critics say that the economic return on carbon sequestration is poor right now because of high energy costs and persistent uncertainties around carbon markets and prices. Hasan argues that cracking the problem actually resolves some of these questions by ensuring that sequestration is permanent. This has encouraged some heavy hitting investors to get on board such as Sam Altman, as well as Bill Gate’s Breakthrough Ventures, an investment entity founded by the who’s who of the tech billionaire world. With this influential pedigree, 44.01 was recently able to close a $37 million series A investment round.
Image credit: Peridotite mineral cross-section – Alessandro Da Mommio via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
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