SPEAKER: Dr. Sigurður Gíslason, Research Professor, University of Iceland

TITLE: Carbon Capture and Storage in Minerals via the CarbFix Method

BIO: Sigurður R. Gislason (Siggi) is a Research Professor at University of Iceland. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1985. Gislason was a co-founder and co-director of the CarbFix project 2006-2020. He has been the president of the European Association of Geochemistry and is an International Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS/USA).

ABSTRACT: The CarbFix project was an international consortium of scientists, engineers and graduate students that was founded in 2006 and lasted until 2020, when the Carbfix company was established. The original partners were University of Iceland, Reykjavík Energy, Columbia University and CNRS in Toulouse France, and Climeworks Switzerland was added in 2017. This group has shown that CO₂ can be captured from concentrated gas streams and directly from the atmosphere, dissolved in water, and injected deep into basaltic rocks where CO₂ mineralizes within two years after injection at about 25°C. In other words, we turn CO₂ into stone. This is now referred to as the “Carbfix method”. It is the safest way of storing CO₂. Basalt forms the largest part of the oceanic floor and about 5% of the continents. Hence there are huge mineralization opportunities in the coastal areas of the Earth. The Carbfix method has been applied to capture and store CO₂ from the Hellisheidi Power Plant in SW-Iceland since 2014. It is also applied in a direct air CO₂ capture plant at the Hellisheidi site using Climeworks-capture method followed by Carbfix- mineral-storage¹. More subsurface CO₂ mineralisation projects are now in preparations worldwide as will be discussed in the talk. 

¹ Oelkers E.H and S.R. Gislason (2023). Carbon Capture and Storage: From Global Cycles to Global Solutions. Geochemical Perspectives 12, 179-349. https://www.geochemicalperspectives.org/online/v12n2/