Project description
Accelerated mineral weathering offers great promise for removing CO2 from air
Renewable energies and reduced CO2 emissions alone will not suffice to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations at levels that meet the goals of the Paris accord on climate. Safe and scalable negative-emission technologies that actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere are also necessary. Research into mineral carbonation has shown that it is possible to mineralise CO2 through enhanced silicate weathering. The EU-funded BAM project will investigate biologically accelerated mineral weathering to sequester CO2, speeding up weathering rates to levels that allow it to become an insurance against potential drawbacks in emission reductions in the next decades. BAM will hereto build on the natural powers that have triggered dramatic changes in the Earth's weathering environment, embedding them into a novel reactor-based technology.
Objective
Conventional climate change mitigation alone will not be able to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a level compatible with the 2°C warming limit of the Paris Agreement. Safe and scalable negative emission technologies (NETs), which actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere and ensure long-term carbon (C) sequestration, will be needed. Fast progress in NET-development is needed, if NETs are to serve as a risk-hedging mechanism for unexpected geopolitical events and for the transgression of tipping points in the Earth system. Still, no NETs are even on the verge of achieving a substantial contribution to the climate crisis in a sustainable, energy-efficient and cost-effective manner.
BAM! develops ‘super bio-accelerated mineral weathering’ (BAM) as a radical, innovative solution to the NET challenge. While enhanced silicate weathering (ESW) was put forward as a potential NET earlier, we argue that current research focus on either 1/ ex natura carbonation or 2/ slow in natura ecosystem-based ESW, hampers the potential of the technology to provide a substantial contribution to negative emissions within the next two decades. BAM! focuses on an unparalleled reactor effort to maximize biotic weathering stimulation at low resource inputs, and implementation of an automated, rapid- learning process that allows to fast-adopt and improve on critical weathering rate breakthroughs.
The direct transformational impact of BAM! lies in its ambition to develop a NET that serves as a climate risk hedging tool on the short term (within 10-20 years). BAM! builds on the natural powers that have triggered dramatic changes in the Earth’s weathering environment, embedding them into a novel, reactor-based technology. The ambitious end-result is the development of an indispensable environmental remediation solution, that transforms large industrial CO2 emitters into no-net CO2 emitters.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium