Skip to main content

Iceland is fighting climate change by capturing CO2 and turning it into stone

iceland co2 carbfix
CarbFix
Humans produced nearly 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2014 and, even with advances in renewable energy, we won’t significantly decrease those emissions any time soon. Iceland’s contribution to this figure is marginal, but the island nation plays a key role in the effort against climate change. A new study on Reykjavík Energy’s CarbFix project describes an innovative way of addressing emissions by turning CO2 into stone.

Around the world, carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques are considered one of our best bets for decreasing emissions while maintaining our current, fossil fuel-dependent energy programs. Still, most CCS techniques are expensive and potentially hazardous since they pressurize and heat the CO2 before storage, increasing its chances to leak back into the atmosphere.

Iceland’s CarbFix project departs from the standard storage model and pumps CO2 deep underground into the country’s volcanic rock, where the gas reacts with calcium, magnesium, and iron in basalt to create solid carbonate minerals. The method was tested at the world’s largest geothermal power plant, Hellisheidi, with remarkable results. Though researchers predicted the process of turning the CO2 to stone would take hundreds or thousands of years, they were surprised to find that 95 percent of the gas was solidified in just two years.

At Hellisheidi, volcanically heated water is used to run turbines to generate energy – a process that produces 40,000 tons of CO2 each year. CarbFix has managed to store 5,000 tons of those emissions each year, with plans to increase storage to 10,000 in 2017.

Where standard CCS costs between $65 to $100 per ton of storage, CarbFix project manager Edda Aradóttir told MIT Technology Review that their method costs just $30 per ton. CarbFix also boasts that the method can be expanded to other regions with basaltic rocks, which can be found throughout the ocean floor and under 10 precent of continental land.

CarbFix isn’t free from criticism though. Some have called the 25 tons of water required to treat each ton of CO2 excessive, though CarbFix insists seawater could be used. Others have also pointed out that Iceland’s basaltic rock is more suitable for such a CCS technique than basalt in other regions. Lastly, global CO2 emissions are so immense that the CarbFix solution will likely only put a small dent in the world’s overall carbon emissions.

Nonetheless, CarbFix offers a promising alternative to other CCS techniques and one that may help reduce carbon emissions until renewable energy becomes the norm.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more