Turning Carbon Emissions into Rocks

In Penn’s Clean Energy Conversions Lab, researcher Peter Psarras and colleagues are repurposing waste from industrial mines, storing carbon pulled from the atmosphere into newly formed rock. The team sees great environmental potential in mine tailings, the sand and sludge left behind after the sought-after ore gets removed. With samples in the lab, they’re trying to determine just how much calcium and magnesium each contains, how to best carbonate it with CO2, how and where they can store the result, and whether the process is scalable.