Mining technologies could capture ‘billions of tonnes of CO2 per year,’ says UBC professor

The world needs to limit global temperature increases to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century to avoid devastating climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that provides policymakers with scientific information about climate change.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are now well over 400 parts per million and global emissions are currently around 36 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. With emissions expected to increase, most experts believe that the 2 degrees Celsius warming target will not be met. To stabilize the global climate, they say, we will need to achieve net negative emissions by pulling more CO2 out of the atmosphere than we emit.

The mining industry could play a significant role in helping to achieve this, according to Greg Dipple, a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and a member of the Mineral Deposit Research Unit at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

For the last decade, Dipple has been studying how ultramafic rocks, which contain magnesium silicate often found in mine tailings, naturally draw CO2 from the air and trap it by forming new carbonate minerals that are stable and can permanently lock-in carbon.

“We will not achieve our global warming targets by simply reducing our emissions,” said Dipple in a telephone interview with The Northern Miner. “To limit global warming, we will need to capture CO2 from the air and store it indefinitely. With the right materials, we can use existing mining technologies to do this at the scale of potentially billions of tonnes of CO2 per year.”

He estimates that reducing just 10% of a mine’s tailings could be sufficient to offset the annual carbon emissions produced by a mining operation, and is now working with other researchers and mining companies to develop technologies that can accelerate these natural processes and be scaled-up to capture CO2 emissions from mining operations.

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