Protect environment by turning CO2 into solid rocks!

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: The main culprit of climate change, environment degradation and green house is the excess of carbon dioxide (CO2) and we are highly responsible for this environmental damage.

Environmentalists worldwide are struggling hard to develop effective tools which can re-purpose the extracted CO2.

Recently an international team of scientists in Iceland invented a unique method yet secure method to chemically alter CO2 emission in the form of solid stone.

For this pioneering experiment, scientists mixed CO2 emissions with water and pumped it hundreds of meters (feet) underground into volcanic basalt rock — where it rapidly turned into a solid.

"We need to deal with rising carbon emissions. This is the ultimate permanent storage — turn them back to stone," said Juerg Matter, lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Science.

In 2012, they began pumping 250 tons of CO2 mixed with water underground.

Scientists had feared it could take hundreds or even thousands of years for the mildly acidic liquid to solidify.

But 95 per cent of the injected mixture — which they had tagged with tracer chemicals in order to check it didn't leak out — had became chalky white stone within two years.

(With PTI inputs)