Trees and vegetation are not the only form of carbon drawdown from the atmosphere. Vast quantities of carbon are naturally stored in rocks. Carbfix provides a natural and permanent storage solution by turning CO2 into stone underground in less than two years.
The idea behind Carbfix involves imitating and accelerating a natural process through which dissolved CO2 and reactive rock formations interact to form thermodynamically stable carbonate minerals, thereby providing a permanent and environmentally benign carbon storage host. In just seven years, Carbfix was transformed from an idea on paper to a fully operational, cost-effective and environmentally benign industrial process to capture CO2 and H2S from emission sources and permanently store it as rock in the subsurface. This rapid and successful innovation development was founded on an industry-academia collaboration, with active involvement of interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and tradespeople. For the Carbfix technology to work, one needs to meet three requirements: favourable rocks, water, and a source of carbon dioxide.
Carbfix started out as a project back in 2006 and was formalised by four founding partners in 2007; Reykjavík Energy, the University of Iceland, CNRS in Toulouse, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The project was driven forward by the project manager Hólmfríður Sigurðardóttir, Dr. Sigurður Gíslason, and Dr. Eric Oelkers. Since 2007, several universities and research institutes have participated in the project under the scope of EU funded sub-projects, including Amphos 21, Climeworks and the University of Copenhagen.
We find that over 95% of the CO2 injected into the Carbfix site in Iceland was mineralised to carbonate minerals in less than two years. This result contrasts with the common view that the immobilisation of CO2 as carbonate minerals within geologic reservoirs takes several hundreds to thousands of years
Mineralisation of injected H2S were reported to occur even faster than CO2.
Incorporation of Carbfix
Carbfix was established as a subsidiary of Reykjavik Energy (OR) in late 2019 and began operations as a separate entity on January 1, 2020. The company’s mission is to become a key instrument in tackling the climate crisis by reaching one billion tons of permanently stored CO2 (1 GtCO2) as rapidly as possible.
Silverstone- Scale up of CO2 capture and storage of geothermal operations.
Project Silverstone deploys full-scale CO2 capture, injection, and mineral storage (CCMS) at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant, reaching a near-zero carbon footprint. The Carbfix capture and injection demonstration plant has been operational at Hellisheiði since 2014 and has injected over 70,000 tonnes of CO2. Currently about 12,000 tonnes of CO2 are captured and injected at the site annually, approximately one-third of the Hellisheiði power plant’s CO2 emissions.
Through the project, a new CO2-optimised capture plant will be constructed bringing the capture efficiency to 95% of the total CO2 emissions.
Emission reduction
The project has considerable scale up potential, providing a significant impact for emission reduction within the geothermal sector. This project alone will deliver 10% of the 55% emission reductions that Iceland’s Climate Action Plan calls for by 2030 within the energy and industrial sectors not covered by the EU ETS. In addition, the technology is readily adaptable to several hard-to-abate sectors, including steel and iron, cement, ammonia, and waste management.
