The road to a stabilized climate is challenging and contentious.
The road to a stabilized climate is challenging and contentious. A number of solutions will be needed to enable a fast, equitable transition away from fossil fuels: among them the development of sustainable energy sources, greener materials, and methods to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.
One of the removal methods scientists are exploring is known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). In carbon capture and storage, CO₂ is captured from industrial sources and injected into deep geological reservoirs underground, theoretically for thousands of years, in much the way water is stored in aquifers.
Sahar Bakhshian, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology, recently used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to fundamentally understand how CO₂ storage works at the level of micrometer-wide pores in the rock, and to determine the characteristics and factors that can help optimize how much CO₂ can be stored.
Writing in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control in December 2021, she explored the trapping efficiency of CO₂ through dissolving the gas into the resident brine in saline aquifers.
Read more at University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Photo Credit: xresch via Pixabay
