Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Scientists investigating the CO2 absorbing properties of mine waste have discovered asbestos fibres are a good candidate for climate change carbon capture projects.
Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change (you read that right)
Scientists are exploring ways to use mineral waste from mines to pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air.by
James Temple
October 6, 2020…
The vast surface area of certain types of fibrous asbestos, a class of carcinogenic compounds once heavily used in heat-resistant building materials, makes them particularly good at grabbing hold of the carbon dioxide molecules dissolved in rainwater or floating through the air.
That includes the most common form of asbestos, chrysotile, a serpentine mineral laced throughout the mountain (serpentine is California’s state rock). The reaction with carbon dioxide mainly produces magnesium carbonate minerals like magnesite, a stable material that could lock away the greenhouse gas for millennia.
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Mineralization is already the main mechanism nature uses in the so-called “slow carbon cycle.” The carbon dioxide in rainwater dissolves basic rocks, producing magnesium, calcium, and other compounds that make their way into the oceans. There, marine life converts the materials into shells and skeletons that eventually turn into limestone and other rock types.
There are more than enough minerals to tie up all the carbon dioxide we’ve ever emitted and more. The problem is that the vast majority are locked away in solid rock that doesn’t come into contact with the greenhouse gas. Even when they’re exposed in rock outcroppings, it takes a long time for these reactions to occur.
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The approaches could include spreading the material out to increase the reactive surface area, running fans that increase the amount of air flowing over the asbestos, or directly injecting concentrated carbon dioxide into the mineral pits.
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It’s possible that some amount of asbestos would remain or could be dispersed in the course of doing the work, Aines says. Those are among the key questions that would need to be tested, he adds.
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Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/06/1009374/asbestos-could-be-a-powerful-weapon-against-climate-change-you-read-that-right/
The plan is to take a known long term lightweight fluffy fibrous carcinogen, spread it on the ground, and blow fans on it to increase air circulation.
I think I prefer to keep the CO2 in the air.
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The real scandal is people who smoked and were exposed to friable asbestos were six times more likely to have cancer than those who didn’t. The plaintiffs’ lawyers got that fact thrown out immediately. Can’t have contributory negligence be part of the problem. While I’m ranting, none of the defendants ever bothered to examine when VOC’s were repeatedly sucked into lungs – Ronson or Zippo ring a bell, anyone? Look at the main cohort suffering meso, and other smoking diseases.
wsbriggs – Check that ‘six times’ – and insert 37 to 90 times. See the seminal study from the 1960’s by Dr. Irving Selikoff et.al. (https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201305-0885ED). This tidbit of medical science history was used to drive the asbestos Permissible Exposure Limit set by OSHA in the USA.
Regards,
MCR
From the article” :The approaches could include spreading the material out to increase the reactive surface area, running fans that increase the amount of air flowing over the asbestos, or directly injecting concentrated carbon dioxide into the mineral pits.
It’s possible that some amount of asbestos would remain or could be dispersed in the course of doing the work, Aines says. Those are among the key questions that would need to be tested, he adds.”
A Lunatic solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
That sounds like another one of those “why don’t you try it first?” type situations.
I call it “Climate Voodoo”.
Dodgy Geezer:
“…I calculate that we will need asbestos underpants sooner than you think!”
Not sure I’m all on board yet with that one. I still have (somewhere) a pair of lead BVDs from the ’50s as recommended by Tom Lehrer “to watch the fellas practice dropping bombs through the clean desert air” back when nuclear testing was a spectator sport in Nevada. That all changed when they started bombing Bikini Atoll and detonated a fashion explosion in female beach attire, a huge improvement over lead BVD’s and your asbestos undies.
Not to worry, let me know when you’re in production, I could change my mind.
Cheers
Mike
Well that’s just stupid.
NEXT!
From the Technology Review article:
“Woodall estimates that one asbestos site in Vermont, with about 30 million tons of waste, could capture as much as 12 million tons of carbon dioxide. Mines globally produce enough mineral by-products to capture nearly 40 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the National Academies study.”
With an annual global CO2 emission of around 36Gt, it would only be necessary to increase the extraction of asbestos by a factor of 900 so that all CO2 emitted can be captured.
Even if this will probably not change the climate very much, trying to capture the CO2 in this way would offer a positive opportunity. All the rotor blades from dismantled wind turbines could be buried under the gigantic mountains of overburden that are created during this process!
The next power couples will be the marriage of asbestos lawyers and climate change litigators.
The plague of first-order thinking.
We’ll have to waive the employment discrimination act for this one. Only Greenies can apply for these new Green jobs and come back James Hardie directors all is forgiven- The Planet Needs You!
The US Government has set aside $30 billion to compensate people who became cancerous due to asbestos inhalation, and to renovate buildings containing asbestos to prevent the fibers from becoming airborne.
Question for these brilliant scientists wanting to use asbestos to absorb CO2: How many people have ever died from CO2 poisoning?
is there no end to the stupidity?
Asbestos tailings piles don’t contain that much asbestos. Copper mine tailings don’t contain that much copper. Gold mine tailings are very low in gold. Good Lord, spare us from modern scientists working on engineering solutions to non-problems. When they mused on using fans to blow 400ppm CO2 air on fluffy asbestos I laughed until I cried.
Humans and other living things essentially oxidize carbon in food and use the energy stored in it to live. Plants, in turn, use the energy from the sun to restore the carbon to freedom, again. It’s a great process…for us. I would resume the process described here buries the oxygen with the carbon, since nothing is said about energy required to make it work. I’m not so sure that burying oxygen, or at least tying it up in minerals, is a good long term plan for us.
I’m sure the CO2 in the exhaust of the mining trucks and rock crushers, exceeds the CO2 absorbed by the mined asbestos fibers….
I’m still trying to find the science to validate the claim that a 1.5 part in 10,000 parts increase in total CO2 spread out over 50 years or so is even remotely the issue it is claimed to be.