CO2 mineral sequestration: developments toward large-scale application

The years ahead will show whether CO2 mineral sequestration can be developed to a unit scale of the order of 1 Mt/a CO2 storage around the year 2020, offering additional large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) capacity besides underground CO2 sequestration. Motivated by the slow deployment of large-scale underground storage of CO2 or simply the availability of large amounts of suitable minerals, progress on mineral sequestration is being steadily made and reported by an increasing number of research teams and projects worldwide. Other well-documented advantages of the method are that it offers leakage-free CO2 fixation that does not require post-storage monitoring and an overwhelmingly large capacity is offered by mineral resources available worldwide, besides the feature that the chemical conversion releases significant amounts of heat. As recognized more recently, it also offers the possibility to operate with a CO2-containing gas directly, removing the expensive CO2 separation step from the CCS process chain. Moreover, the solid products can be used in applications ranging from land reclamation to iron- and steelmaking. With the technology overview given in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on CCS (2005) as a reference point, the method is reviewed and its capacity, weaknesses, and strengths are re-assessed. The state-of-the-art after twenty years of R&D work as reflected by ongoing development work inside and outside laboratories is summarized, illustrating the future prospects of CO2 mineralization within a portfolio of CCS technologies under development worldwide. Current developments include an increasing number of patents and patent applications and a trend toward scale-up and demonstration. (c) 2011 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd