Capturing Carbon - The Basics of Carbon Capture and Storage Technology

Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to planet geo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: well, Chris. Yeah. Stop looking at your massive monitor screen. Look at me, man. Look at me.

Chris Bolhuis: I I, I just making sure everything is okay. NASA is fine.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Mass is fine. Get the Artemis. Mission's about to launch. You're running the Rover on Mars on one screen and you're launching rockets on the other.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. I'm identifying rocks on the surface of Mars as we speak speaking of rocks, I just had an emergency. I had to leave a couple minutes

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. What was going on in the, in the background?

Chris Bolhuis: Oh yeah. Well, in my basement I have a fireplace and I have a rock wall that I, I built myself with my own, like really good specimens that I've collected from all over the country.

Chris Bolhuis: So

Chris Bolhuis: It is. And so Jenny comes in and says, Chris, um, a rock just fell off the fireplace and I'm like, oh [00:01:00] no. So I bolted up, ran into the room. It's it's okay. Um, one of my rocks has a lot of sulfide minerals in it, like pie, right. And that one, a piece of it crumbled a little bit and, and fell off. So it's really not that big of a deal, but that would've been like a massive nightmare for

Dr. Jesse Reimink: the structural integrity of the wall is still there. It's still, it's

Chris Bolhuis: The wall is okay.

Chris Bolhuis: The wall is okay. It still looks great.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: that would be devastating if that rock

Chris Bolhuis: I know there's a piece of this story that Jenny didn't tell me though. She was down here cleaning and vacuuming and all that kind of stuff. And I know she was vacuuming the rock and knocked a piece off that's I just that's gotta be what happened. It didn't just like fall

Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's right. No, this doesn't just happen. Jenny's vacuuming it with the little wand, right? With the little sweeper wand on it. Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh man. Well, crisis averted. That's great.

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, Well, Hey today, Jesse. Let's do we wanna do intros or we just gonna jump right in? What do you

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, why not? You're Chris bull [00:02:00] height, my former high school teacher earth science teacher, extraordinaire from the great state of Michigan. I took a bunch of different classes from you and you taught me the basics of geoscience and geology got me into it actually, too.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. And you are Dr. Jesse Reimink. You're one of my former students, as you just said, you went to hope college right here in west Michigan and got your bachelor's degree in geology. And then you went to the university of Alberta, got your PhD. And you're now working as a professor at Penn state university in the geoscience department, which is awesome because that's one of the best geoscience departments in the country.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, it's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: a great place to work.

Chris Bolhuis: that's right, and today we are gonna talk about carbon capture and carbon storage, which is a hot topic, like it's hotly researched.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So this is the acronym that you might read is CCS, carbon capture and storage. And that's what that stands for carbon capture and carbon storage CCS. And there is so much geoscience knowledge being poured into. [00:03:00] Problem of climate change and it's all being driven by CO2. And so what we're really talking about is carbon dioxide capture and storage, which, you know, we, we shorten it to carbon capture and storage, but Chris we've covered this before. We've talked about the greenhouse effect. We've covered some basics about the greenhouse effect. That was a long time ago. That was probably two years ago, one of our earlier episodes. So if you wanna primer into why CO2 matters or a deep dive into why CO2 matters, you can go back to that episode and we'll put a link to that in the show notes here. But this I think is more like a solutions based thing. I, I don't know. What do you think about this episode? Is that a fair Des.

Chris Bolhuis: yes. I think we need to talk about the difference between carbon capture and carbon storage. Those are two different things, and we're gonna get into that and we're gonna talk about some potential solutions too. The research that's currently going on startup companies, etcetera, but we're also though going to do a little bit with. that [00:04:00] carbon cycle works just a little bit. And why carbon dioxide is the gas that is of primary concern.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. You mentioned startups. There are so many startup companies, really exciting technologies being leveraged into this carbon capture and storage space. And they, from my perspective, I'm interested in this because they are hiring like mad. So there's a lot of. Actually industry focus and interest in this space. And it's a huge, uh, future employment sector for people with geoscience knowledge and geoscientists will be able to work in these communities. And it's just a big industry. it's actually, there's a market here for carbon capture and storage, and we're gonna touch on that brief.

Chris Bolhuis: You said that you are really interested in this. What, what does that mean? Are you ? Are you looking at leaving the, uh, academic world and going to work for industry? Is that

Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, no, no, not yet. I mean, you know, you never know what the paychecks might be, but no, uh, no, it's more just like, You know, to, to provide students with a clear direction of where the industry is going. I feel like I [00:05:00] have some responsibility to know where the geoscience industry is now and is going in the future to provide students with, you know, perspectives on that. So that's kind of why I'm interested and we're hoping to interview, some people from the startup companies that are actually trying to increase the, the efficiency of carbon capture and storage technologies in the near future. So stay tuned to that.

Chris Bolhuis: Looking forward to that for sure. All right, Jesse, let's go ahead and get into this. We need to, differentiate the terms what's the difference between carbon capture and carbon storage. So let's start right now, Jesse, with what is carbon capture? What's going.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's exactly as the name implies, remember carbon means CO2 in this instance and. CO2 is a molecule in the air, but it's really, really low concentrations. The concentrations really important, Chris, but what is it right now? I, I, I can't, I think I put in 400 it's somewhere around there right now.

Chris Bolhuis: right now we are a little bit over 415 parts per million concentration in the [00:06:00] atmosphere, but I want to go back a second because when I first started my teaching career, 25 years ago, Carbon dioxide levels were a little under 350 parts per million. To me, that's a huge increase in what seems to be a very short amount of time going from 350 to approaching 420 parts per million in about 25 years. Um, that's a little

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That is a lot and so I think we need to kind of level center what these concentrations actually mean because the concentration matters. Like there's a huge difference between three 50 and four 15, exactly as you said, Chris, but that still, the concentration is not high. And that comes into this carbon capture conversation. This is why we have to capture carbon is because it is such low concentration. So it's football season here at Penn state. Our football stadium is very large. Chris, you haven't come to a game yet. I've actually not been to a game either. So

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, you, I have words for you. You [00:07:00] don't tell me I haven't come to a game. I haven't been invited to a game yet. You're a real piece of

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Nobody has, unfortunately I am going in. Let's see, when will this come out? I'm gonna be going soon. And, uh, with my family, my in-laws are coming. My parents are coming. We're gonna have, uh, you know, a big to-do during the Ohio state game. So, uh, but the stadium, yeah, we gotta go to the big one, right? The stadium. seats about 120,000 people. So if you imagine that stadium 120,000, the big house at university of Michigan is about the same number Penn state and Michigan state go back and forth, adding a couple seats to compete, to see who has the biggest stadium, but it's in that 120,000 ish number. So if you're at that game, you picture an entirely packed football stadium. 415 parts per million means out of a million molecules, 415 of them will be carbon dioxide. If we would convert that into people at a football game of 120,000 people, the number is 50. [00:08:00] So 415 parts per million is 50 people out of 120,000. which means if you're watching a game on TV and you know, 50 people that are at the game and they're seated kind of randomly throughout the stadium, you would have to watch most of the game probably to find one of them, I would think. Right Chris, like if you were watching the stands and trying to see somebody, you know, it's gonna take you a while

Chris Bolhuis: yeah. That's a difficult thing.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: well done, Jesse. I love the analogy.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It took me a while to come up with, so

Chris Bolhuis: with . to your point, though, that being in such a low concentration, but such an important gas that we need to reduce that concentration back down to where it was, know, 25 years ago. And even below that, actually, how do we. That's a tough thing. We ha what you're saying then is we have to filter through all of the other millions of molecules to get those 415. [00:09:00] And we have to do that at, you know, we have to do that at scale.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's the thing we have to do this at scale. That is exactly the, the issue here is we have to filter through a lot of air to get all of those CO2 molecules and separate a bunch of them out. We don't have to get all of 'em, but we have to take out a bunch of them, a huge fraction of them. So , the way to think about this is , we're trying to make chemistry happen faster. We're trying to. Speed up this process or drive this reaction faster. And there's a few reactions that happen, which we're gonna get into in a little bit here, but we just have to speed things up. So Chris, let me try out another little analogy on here on you. And this, this might not be as good. So, you know, keep me in line here. but let's say I'm at the game and I know 50 people there and you know, there's so many people, cell phone towers don't work. So I can't communicate with 'em by cell phone and I wanna go for a beer with 10 of 'em after the game. remember they're all distributed randomly throughout the crowd. I gotta go around and try and find 10 of my friends [00:10:00] to get them and aggregate them and say, oh, we're gonna meet at the north gate and we're gonna go for beer. It's gonna take me a long, long ass time to go through and find 10 people. Right? Like it, it's gonna take a while. And that's the reaction that's sort of like running into somebody, shaking their hand and saying, Hey, meet me at the north gate at a certain time. We're gonna go for a beer afterwards. That's a reaction. That's like this carbon. We're grabbing a carbon molecule, a CO2 molecule, and it happens really slowly when you have low concentration. So if you watched a game at your house and you invited 50 people over to watch the game at your house, you'd be able to easily find 10 people to go for a beer afterwards with you, right? Like if you get these things in more concentration, you can drive the reactions more efficiently and faster.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Well done. Not as good as the other one, I don't think, but, you know,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Fair enough.

Chris Bolhuis: I kind of got lost in the story about grabbing 10 friends to go for beer afterwards. You lost me with that. I started thinking about, well, yeah, but that's a worthy effort right there, you know, it's, it's worth the [00:11:00] work.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's.

Chris Bolhuis: I want to take this opportunity though, to talk a little bit about this, because it's so interesting to me that such a low concentration gas, 450 parts per million can be so important. What exactly is going on? So a quick primer, short wavelength, infrared radiation, visible light coming in from the sun passes right through these greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide is one of several greenhouse gases, but it's the most important. It passes right through them. But then what happens when this radiation reaches the surface? Some of it is absorbed at the surface of the earth and what the earth does then is reradiate this energy, but it's a longer wavelength. So that visible light. And short wavelength, infrared radiation now is longer wavelength infrared. And that's the whole thing because that longer wavelength infrared radiation, which is heat cannot [00:12:00] pass through these greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. And so that's how the greenhouse effect works. It's a good. Because that's what enables us to live on this planet. Right. But if we keep on adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, then we still let that radiation in, but we let less of it out. And that's how climate change happens then. And so that's why this is so important, but yet it's amazing. Isn't it? That we're talking about a gas that is so little concentration, 415 parts per million. it's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's really an amazing, uh, amazing thing. And so to decrease this effect, we want to decrease this sort of blanketing effect that you're describing with the different wavelengths of radiation. We need to get CO2 outta the atmosphere and store it somewhere. And so this is carbon capture is taking carbon from the atmosphere and concentrating it somewhere so that we can store it more efficiently, you know, not [00:13:00] 415 parts per million, not 50 people out of 120,000 at the football game, but 50 people out of a hundred people or something like that, where it's easier to filter through and find my friends.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right now, we're talking about helping and speeding up what already happens in nature.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, that is, that is the key part. Chris, that is a amazingly well phrased point, right? There is, this is a natural reaction. And I think this is where a lot of confusion and misconceptions come in. So sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to highlight, this is a great point.

Chris Bolhuis: because on earth, the oceans do this for free. They soak up carbon dioxide, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and it gets dissolved like a kind of a sponge, right? It, soaks up this carbon dioxide and that carbon dioxide then is turned into two things chemically. We don't need to get into the chemistry on this really, but it get, it turns it into carbonic. Which is H two co three, and it turns it also into bicarbonate, which is H [00:14:00] co three. the bottom line is that this carbonic acid, which is a weak acid adds to what's called ocean acidification. it takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and puts it into the ocean. So I'm gonna flip it to you a second. All right. We have this carbon dioxide that's dissolved in the water. Now what's the natural step that occurs then after

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So this is getting us to the carbon storage part. Really? We're moving now from carbon capture, just concentrating CO2 to the carbon storage. What happens to it? Where do we put it and in. This happens naturally all the time, the bicarbonate or the dissolved CO2 in the ocean reacts with other cat ions. you've used cat ions before Chris they're positively charged that's.

Chris Bolhuis: No there, no, it's positive. Not pow. You're saying positive. It's

Dr. Jesse Reimink: positive.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: PO positive. I'm trying[00:15:00]

Chris Bolhuis: oh my gosh. You can't say, say paw. Paw. Say, say positive.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: positive. that's

Chris Bolhuis: keep saying

Dr. Jesse Reimink: positive.

Chris Bolhuis: it's is not what you're

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, well, they're cat ions. So they're positively charged. They're positively charged ions, but things like calcium and magnesium, conveniently and naturally bond with CO2 dissolve the ocean, which has becomes co three and form minerals, calcite Dolemite or Magna site. That's CA a co three C a mg co three or mg co three. These are naturally occurring. Minerals that are formed both by biological activities, both by creatures, making their houses, making shells and a biotically just by precipitation from an ocean that has a lot of calcium, magnesium, and co three dissolved in it. And those will bond together and form these minerals.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Let me interrupt a second real quick. So if water, if salt, water, ocean, [00:16:00] water evaporates, and it gets super warm. Once it gets saturated with these like calcium carbonates and magnesium, carbonates like calcite and. Dolemite once it's saturated, it will begin to lay down these rocks just due to like high rates of evaporation and warm temperatures and things like that. It's kind of like if you took a glass full of salt water and you just set the glass on a kitchen counter and just leave it there for a month, you come back and the water's all gone, but now your glass is crusted with salt and that is a way that carbon can be removed naturally from the oceans as.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, and we form rocks. These are all parts of very common, very prevalent rocks that Chris, you really like to use to, uh, you know, get rid of your acid reflux. You just eat some limestone crush up some limestone, which is calcite. So limestone has these doula stone has these minerals in them, loads of rocks have these minerals, these co three. Bearing minerals and which is basically carbon dioxide. And so this happens all the time on earth, but [00:17:00] that transition taking CO2 from the atmosphere, putting it in the ocean, then eventually making minerals with it that end up as rocks. That's part of what we call the long term carbon cycle on earth or Chris. What's the other way. The slow carbon cycle, I guess, is sometimes called. Yeah. so this takes a long time to do like. Atmospheric CO2 can go up a lot. Like it's doing today due to fossil fuel emissions, it can go up a lot and it takes a long time for the ocean and the minerals to form, to balance that out way too long to solve our climate change problems. But this is a natural process. So I'm gonna kind of summarize here. All the carbon storage is doing is trying to speed up this very natural reaction, which is taking CO2 outta the atmosphere and bonding it, ultimately bonding it with calcium or magnesium into a mineral phase, which is then stable for a long term carbon cycle. It's stable for a long, long time in that phase.

Chris Bolhuis: So do we wanna transition then here we, I think we [00:18:00] differentiated pretty well. The difference between carbon capture and then carbon storage where rocks and minerals get deposited on the ocean floor. Now it's taken outta the ocean and stored for very long periods of time. How can we do this? And help speed up the process of capturing carbon and then storing it. We have to do both. So what what's let's transition into that. Can we do that?

Dr. Jesse Reimink:

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, So there's a lot of options out there. Cuz remember we have to do two things, carbon capture and carbon storage, some companies and some startups and some research initiatives are doing just the carbon capture, just concentrating. Some are focusing just on carbon storage and some are doing both at the same time. We're trying to do both at the same time, but there's so many different options here, Chris, it's a really confusing space to sort of research and look at cuz there's loads of different. Potential paths forward. And so I guess we kind of have to think about why, why are there so many options we've [00:19:00] described this kind of relatively simple thing in the last, you know, 15 minutes or 20 minutes here? Why is it so complicated? Why are there so many options, uh,

Chris Bolhuis: Well, part of it is because just of the natural geology that we're dealing with here, there are so many unstable minerals on the surface that contain the necessary cat ions of magnesium and calcium. For instance, the most common rock on the planet is basalt. It's what covers 99% of the ocean floor. Right? Well, basalt has. Unstable minerals in it I mean, if, think about Bowen's reaction series again, this goes back to an episode we did a long time ago. Basalt is loaded with minerals that form at high temperature and those high temperature minerals. but minerals are most stable when they exist in the environment in which they formed. So because they form at such high temperature, they are a long ways away. They're further away from the [00:20:00] conditions in which they exist at, at the surface now. So they're not stable. They break down easier and. You have that an instability, another really common mineral Aine Aine has loads of magnesium in it. Purine has lots of calcium in it. And the both of these minerals break down really easily. At the surface. They release calcium, they release magnesium, which then bonds with the bicarbonate and it locks up CO2 for a long, long time.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, both of these rock types, we can categorize them as mafic and ultra MEIC. If you're familiar with those terms, mafic is the oceanic crossed it's black rock it's really dark collared. Basalt is the most common one. Ultra mafic is what's called Pite. Um, it's, you know, has a lot of Aine in it. It often looks green. I would be shocked if many people have ever seen prototype out there in the field because it weathers away so quickly. There's not a lot of it on the surface. This is the mantle rock. And so there's not a lot of it exposed on the [00:21:00] surface and when it does, it goes quick.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. May means rich and iron magnesium. So ultra Mafi is mafic on steroids. Right. I do wanna say though, that, uh, up in the upper peninsula, in Marquette, in prese park, there is loads of Pite exposed at the surface and it's just a crumbly mess. It's breaking down. Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's horrible. It's the same thing is, uh, exposed near Baltimore around, around Baltimore, in Maryland, around Eastern Pennsylvania, where I live. And what this does is it turns into Spen tonight, which is a rock that is the weathered product of. Pite and people use this for building stones. Sometimes you can get countertops made of it. It's really beautiful rock. It's all weathered. It's all shot full of weathered stuff. And a lot of that is carbon bearing minerals because CO2 has gone into those reactions. And let me just summarize

Dr. Jesse Reimink: wanna interrupt right now

Chris Bolhuis: Let me interrupt you a second. Um, do you remember us collecting [00:22:00] cite when we went to Maine and New York and New Jersey? Yeah, we, we collected some cite,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Where was that? I don't remember

Dr. Jesse Reimink: in

Chris Bolhuis: I think we were in New Jersey. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Um, plus serpentinite is one of the coolest names for a rock that exists.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. totally.

Chris Bolhuis: fun to say.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's so fun and it's a spectacularly beautiful rock. Oh man. It's stunning rock. But the minerals in it, when you take Aine, which is iron magnesium and silica and oxygen, that's all Aine is it breaks down. You get calcium and magnesium. That's kind of free floating. You can form calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate. Magnesium carbonate is Magna site. And that is a very common mineral in serpentinite. So you take Alvin, you put it at the surface and it releases magnesium. It draws down CO2 naturally. So back

Chris Bolhuis: So, all right, you're getting windy here.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: re I gotta redirect you [00:23:00] here. Like, um,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Get me outta the

Chris Bolhuis: just, you a Ramly like

Dr. Jesse Reimink: way too much. I'm rambling on

Chris Bolhuis: okay, Jesse, let's get into this then. How can we speed up the process of both carbon capture and carbon storage? Okay. I'm gonna keep you outta the weed. It's my

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. All right.

Chris Bolhuis: how do we do

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So there's many options. Let's just think about capture first. There's a bunch of different options. uh, most of them have to do with chemistry, just atmospheric chemistry, giant fans that suck in. Atmospheric air and screens that kind of filter out the CO2 and you get a concentrated CO2 version. We can put these at the top of smoke stacks that concentrate the CO2, the smoke stack is already concentrating CO2. If you're at a natural gas fired power plant there's CO2 and high concentration going into the atmosphere there, capture it at the source. It makes it easier. So there's many ways to potentially do the capture side. When we think about the storage side. [00:24:00] If you have concentrated CO2 in a liquified form, perhaps you can inject it underground into,

Chris Bolhuis: on, let me interject. So how would you get carbon dioxide in a liquified form that would have to be then carbon dioxide? That's just highly, highly pressurized,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, you, you pressure it. You cool it down typically. And that's the way to store really concentrated CO2 in a more space, efficient manner is to make it a liquid

Dr. Jesse Reimink: and.

Chris Bolhuis: That's right. So I want also interrupt something again that, I think a lot of people, my, my students, particularly, they don't view carbon dioxide as something that. Like, well, if you can capture it, first of all, what does that look like? And second of all, you can just put it somewhere, right. But people don't understand that carbon dioxide in these kinds of volumes has a ton of mass to it. And it takes up a lot of space. Right. And people don't think of gases that way typically. But it's true. if you took a, let's say a pound of coal, which a lot of, you know, [00:25:00] power plants burned coal to produce electricity. If you took a pound of. Which is almost all carbon and you burn it that one pound of coal combines with oxygen. Oh two in the air to produce CO2. If you captured all of that gas. In a balloon somehow, right? Like a large rubber balloon, the gas inside the balloon would weigh 2.7 ish pounds. So you're, I mean, you know, like that's now something that you can quantify and grab onto a lot of people don't think of it that way that wait a minute, a gas, you can't see it. You know, it's really nothing, but nah, it is, it has mass and it takes up a lot of space. , and that's what we're talking about removing outta the atmosphere. So what if you capture it now, you gotta do something with.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: And that's exactly where we get to the sort of building rocks. What we want to do is take that concentrated CO2 and build minerals and then build rocks with it. So, one thing to do is you can inject it underground, usually into like, Old [00:26:00] oil and gas Wells. And you can hope that the reaction chemistry happens that that chemistry of taking calcium or magnesium and bonding with that CO2 you've injected down there. You can hope that those minerals start to form and sometimes they do. And sometimes you can keep CO2 down there for a long time. It's not existing in the liquid or the gas state though. We're trying to build minerals with it. That's the goal.

Chris Bolhuis: Now, this injection thing is kind of controversial, right? Because some people argue whether or not it's safe, what would make it unsafe? Like why is this a, a part of the discussion? What does that mean?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, there's a couple different ways. To make it unsafe, but it's basically if the CO2 does not bond with the things to make minerals, if it doesn't bond with calcium or magnesium to make minerals, then it could be dissolved in the groundwater and it could end up coming back up to the atmosphere. So it might not be a long term solution to putting carbon somewhere. We want to be really sure that it's putting the carbon into a stable mineral phase. It's building [00:27:00] rocks with it that are stable for a very, very long time. Now. I think the technology is pretty good, but you're right. It's controversial. I mean, there are ways to do it well, and there are ways to not do it well. by injecting CO2, concentrated CO2 down into the ground somewhere. The other thing we can do is we can drive mineral reactions. So there are certain. Startup companies that are trying to do both the carbon capture and the carbon storage at the same time. So they're doing things like we've talked about this Aine thing, this Aine reaction that happens, they would take crushed up Aine and just spread it out on the surface basically. And your carbon and magnesium get released by the weathering product. And then they bond with CO2 and they form Magna site or Cal site. And there you go. You've made your minerals that you're interested in. And if you.

Chris Bolhuis: yeah. I'm gonna interrupt you here a second. Jesse, you said that it's ground up, uh, purine and Aine. And the reason why that's important is because it's a surface area issue. Let me give you an analogy. If [00:28:00] you, um, wanna burn a big log. You throw a big log on a fire, it doesn't burn well. Right. But if you take that log and split it up into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller pieces, and then throw that into the fire, it's gonna burn much faster because you're exposing all that wood to the air to, you know, it's a surface area to volume. Kind of ratio thing going on, and that's the same thing. If you take Aine and ground it up, you're exposing much more of the Aine to the conditions and allowing that reaction then to proceed at a much faster rate. And this is something that the research on this is really amazing. I mean, they're, they're grounding, Aine up to the same size grains and they're injecting these liquids through it and they're measuring the permeability at which these liquids are flowing through the Aine and how the permeability changes as the reactions proceed. But what they're finding, I thought this was so cool. They're finding that as these reactions proceed, the salt [00:29:00] grow right. And they crack up the rock even further, which keeps the permeability flowing. That's a unbelievable.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: It's really, really cool. Really cool. And so there's again, in this same space of like spreading Alvin out on the surface or spreading ultra Mafa rock on the surface, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. Some people wanna put them in wetland areas or in the ocean to actually do that same chemistry that we talked about CO2 into the ocean water, then it makes a rock. Whereas some people are proposing doing this on the surface and driving this reaction via the rainwater or just reaction with the air. So it's concentrated, it's easy to store and then you can take those minerals and you can either put them somewhere or take out the CO2 and cons. Then you have concentrated CO2 and drive the reaction. So there's a bunch of different ways to do it. Those are just two examples of the dozens that are out there of ways to actually naturally carbon capture and storage

Chris Bolhuis: dozens. I have a [00:30:00] question for you and I don't know, you might not know the answer to this. I don't know this ground up Aine purine that then has been put through this, these reactions, right? Does that make good soil?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I don't know the answer to that. I don't know. That's a good question. I'm not sure.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: So I guess the question Chris here that is maybe a misconception that a lot of people have is why are there startup companies doing this and. The answer is a little bit obvious once you think about it, like, I don't know if anybody's booked a plane ticket recently, but when you book a plane ticket on most of the major airlines, you can click a button at the bottom that says, oh, give $4 or 10 bucks to offset my carbon emissions. That's a market right there for drawing down CO2. So there's companies that are on the other side of those transactions that are saying, I will sell United airlines, a carbon credit for a certain amount of dollars. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to either knock down trees or I'm going to actually physically store CO2, [00:31:00] pull it outta the atmosphere and start in minerals. I'm gonna make minerals with CO2 and that's their market. So this is actually a huge market and a. Big and probably growing industry here.

Chris Bolhuis: I agree. It was interesting that, you know, company, I think it was heirloom, that is a part of breakthrough energy's program, which is, if you go back to our interview with Ashley Gross, what an amazing program, and then to come across, this is we're getting ready for this. It was really cool to see that, you know, because their benchmark is a pretty high benchmark. You have to prove that you can remove. 1% of the carbon that is annually put into the atmosphere. that's a big benchmark to, to

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a huge road.

Chris Bolhuis: you know? Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: the, the number that you're trying to

Chris Bolhuis: Well, I think it's 50 million tons of, yeah. 50 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So the, the market for this CO2 varies widely. So if you're, a startup company, [00:32:00] you say I'm gonna draw down CO2 in some way. Who am I gonna charge? Who am I gonna get as a client to do that? The market varies widely. Some of these companies, they're in the thousands of dollars per ton of CO2, and they're getting lower, but it's a bit really sort of unstable market, but. It's a huge one. Cuz we put a ton of CO2 into the air as humans that eventually in some way, shape or form, we're gonna have to draw down. It's just the way it is. And so we need to decrease the amount we put into the atmosphere for sure. But we're gonna have to start probably drawing it down as well. And so that's why there's this enterprise around carbon capture and storage and a big conversation around it.

Chris Bolhuis: you said exactly what I was gonna say too, that the solution to this problem is so multifaceted. It's not just reducing carbon emissions. It's also trying to figure out how to take the carbon that's in the atmosphere and remove it. Uh, this is it's so complicated, but yet, so fascinating. [00:33:00] You know, you're right. You, you alluded this at the beginning of the episode, that the opportunities for geoscientists now coming up, I think there are gonna be jobs that you and I have not even thought about in the future.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Absolutely.

Chris Bolhuis: what an exciting market

Dr. Jesse Reimink: I've seen jobs advertise for some of these companies in doing research for this that I've never heard of. Right. And, and we have not necessarily, prepared students explicitly for this market, but if you're. Interested in geosciences. This is a, a potential massive opportunity. I think

Chris Bolhuis: you're that's you're right, because we're putting about 40 billion, tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every single year. I mean, that's a huge market,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Huge market. And a lot of these companies come out of academia. So, you know, these are people who did their PhD looking at, ultra rock chemistry and, you know, spun it off into a startup, into an actual company that I think has some future to it. And there's a whole bunch of these. And a lot of the research comes out of, academia, [00:34:00] master's PhD, students who, who go off and, and do these great, amazing things. So they're exactly Chris and I think Ashley Gross said this as well. Really there's a Lot of opportunity here. It is a massive opportunity, which is really fun.

Chris Bolhuis: So if you're sitting there listening to this podcast and you're wondering, Hmm. Should I go get my degree in geoscience. The answer to that is unequivocally. Yes. Go get your degree because you're gonna end up doing something maybe that you never, no one has ever thought of yet anyway. And also you have an excuse to just travel the world and see really cool things because, Hey, I'm a geologist and that's what we do. So yes. Go get your

Dr. Jesse Reimink: cause cites so pretty

Chris Bolhuis: That's right.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah.

Chris Bolhuis: Um,

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris, this was a, this was a good one. Carbon capturing

Chris Bolhuis: Hold on. Let me, I want to, Jesse, before we leave, I just wanna go back and, and review a second. How can we help carbon capture reactions happen faster and how can we help carbon storage happen [00:35:00] faster?

Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, carbon capture is concentrating. It's taking 415 parts per million CO2 molecules and increasing those in some way. Uh, with fans, with reaction chemistry, capturing at smoke stacks, you need to increase the concentration because then it's easier to store it. It's easier to drive the reactions to make minerals and the carbon storage comes in when we take CO2 and drive it through usually some bicarbonate ion. Carbonic acid and we bond it with calcium, magnesium, sometimes iron sodium and make minerals. We're actually making minerals. So the carbon capture is concentrating. The carbon storage is building minerals and rocks with it.

Chris Bolhuis: And then once we build those minerals and rocks, we gotta do something with them and that, you know

Dr. Jesse Reimink: But very exciting. Lots of possibilities and very exciting. Yeah. Well, Chris, that's a wrap. You can follow us on all the social medias we're at planet geo cast. Send us an email planet, geo cast, gmail.com and give us a rating and a review. If you haven't yet, please do that. That really helps the [00:36:00] algorithm. We very much appreciate it. You can go to our website, planet geo cast.com and you can support us on that page as well. We really appreciate all the support we've gotten so far. Help us, uh, keep going.

Chris Bolhuis: One of the most important things that we ask is just please share our podcast with somebody that you think might like it or somebody that you think might not like it

Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's right. That's right. They might not like it. That's fine.

Chris Bolhuis: it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jesse Reimink: perfect. All right, Chris, take care, man.

Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.

Image By Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10030057