As I recall there are nickel mines in Canada that have released large
volumes of olivine-rich overburden.
Also SA diamond mines produce a lot of kimberlite, also olivine rich.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberlite
Oliver.
On 28/01/2015 09:23, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:
There are a fairly large number of open-pit chromite mines which occur
in olivine rocks (dunites). This means that they have large dumps of
crushed dunites, which provide of course even cheaper olivine to use
than mining fresh rocks. The same holds for magnesite mines, the
magnesite is in veins in olivine rock. The one I know best is in
northern Greece, and there are at least 10 million tons of crushed
olivine rock on the tailings. The olivine mines in Norway, notably
Aheim are practically free of overburden (no climate for laterite
formation, and fairly steep topography), Olaf Schuiling
*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Lockley
*Sent:* dinsdag 27 januari 2015 23:59
*Cc:* Geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization
Technology | The Energy Collective
Can anyone shed any light on whether there are already large opencast
mining operations in the world with significant amounts of
olivine-rich overburden?
If that's the case, they'll already have all the necessary mining and
transport equipment in place. Furthermore, dumping the overburden is a
massive headache for miners. CDR could solve this.
Getting rid of overburden olivine by marine dumping for CDR could be
like the EOR of the oil industry.
Combining it with erosion reduction would make this a win-win operation.
Any coal mine with a 3:1 ratio of overburden to coal becomes carbon
neutral, and metal ore mines become massively carbon negative.
A
On 27 Jan 2015 16:42, "Mike MacCracken" <mmacc...@comcast.net
<mailto:mmacc...@comcast.net>> wrote:
Hi Greg—The flaw in both of our arguments seems to be our assumption
that the world is rational. Right now there are tremendous
opportunities for cost-effective (i.e., few-year payback) efficiency
steps and yet, as noted in a CEO survey in the news yesterday, despite
the clear risk and the opportunities to do something about it, the
surveyed CEOs don’t seem to think this is a significant issue. There
are also tremendous opportunities to slow the warming by cutting
short-lived species—all quite straightforward and with many
co-benefits to health, air quality, biomass preservation and
more—maybe the world is moving slowly to eventually do that.
Fortunately, the cost of renewables/alternative energy sources is
coming down so that change is starting, but lots more could be done
that is cost effective (witness solar panels on my roof giving me a
9+% guaranteed after tax return on investment) and there is just not a
real sense of urgency even though the Social Cost of Carbon studies
(not just the new one in Nature) show an external cost of order
$200/ton of CO2. Where is rationality in all of this? In a rational
world, lots would be going on in mitigation and then there would still
be value in pulling CO2 lower, and augmented weatherization would be
then a really key step (certainly worth researching, but given all the
cost effective opportunities right now not being taken advantage of,
diverting money to go forward with mineral weathering seems to me a
diversion of money form the most cost effective approaches). So, my
problem is not with air CO2 management in concept, just that it would
be so much more cost effective not to put the CO2 into the air in the
first place.
Mike
On 1/26/15, 11:27 PM, "Greg Rau" <gh...@sbcglobal.net
<http://gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
Mike et al.,
I don't think anyone is asking mineral weathering to singlehandedly
solve the problem, though the fact that it can and will naturally
solve the problem given enough time means it does have the proven
capacity to do so, unlike any other CDR scheme I am aware of. How much
accelerated weathering we do does largely come down to extraction,
processing, and movement of mineral mass. Yes, Gt's of CO2 mitigation
does require Gt's of mineral, but why is this necessarily a
showstopper if we fail to stabilize CO2 by other means? We currently
extract about 2.5 Gt of minerals/yr. Is it unthinkable that we
wouldn't/couldn't double or triple this in the interest of helping to
stabilize air CO2, climate and ocean acidity? Or would you prefer to
impact vastly larger land areas and potentially disrupt food and fiber
production by employing IPCC-endorsed BECCS or afforestation? All
methods of air CO2 management have benefits, costs, impacts, and
tradeoffs. Let's hope that we invest in the research to well
understand these for all of the CO2 management options available, and
that we then make rational decisions on their deployment (in time)
based on this info. Given the decisions and endorsements made so far,
I'm not holding my breath. Hence, looking forward to that private
resilience session in Paris.
Greg
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Mike MacCracken <mmacc...@comcast.net
<http://mmacc...@comcast.net>>
*To:* Geoengineering <Geoengineering@googlegroups.com
<http://Geoengineering@googlegroups.com>>
*Cc:* Andrew Lockley <andrew.lock...@gmail.com
<http://andrew.lock...@gmail.com>>; Bill Stahl <bstah...@gmail.com
<http://bstah...@gmail.com>>
*Sent:* Monday, January 26, 2015 5:09 PM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization
Technology | The Energy Collective
Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The
Energy Collective
Here is another way to think of the amount of mass being talked about.
The global average per capita use of carbon today is of order 9.
GtC/yr/7B people, so about 1.3 ton per person of carbon. Multiply by
3.67 to get to CO2, and it is about 5 t CO2 per person. Would olivine
be an equal mass (or a bit more to match mole to mole)? That is a lot
of olivine—and for every person on Earth to deal with present
emissions—even if this is off by a factor of a few!!! Every person on
Earth—not just everyone on coastlines in NJ or the US or the world.
This is why we have to get global emissions down down, down and then
also be doing something like this.
Mike
On 1/26/15, 5:36 PM, "Andrew Lockley" <andrew.lock...@gmail.com
<http://andrew.lock...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Yes, placing olivine accurately is almost the exact equivalent of
vacuum dredging, but in reverse.
You could dump it with a huge Panamax class vessel, but it you'd end
up with the drop too far from the shore, and probably too bunched up,
too.
With a smaller ship, like a dredger, you'd get the distribution you
need. Added to which, the materials handling costs are going to be
almost exactly right, because with dredging you're pulling material
out of the sea in an arbitrary but nearshore location, and moving it
to the nearest port with a rail head where you can get rid of it.
It's olivine backwards.
A
On 26 Jan 2015 22:24, "Bill Stahl" <bstah...@gmail.com
<http://bstah...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I hesitate to add to what is already a leviathan of a thread... but
here goes.
Assuming a carbon price were in effect, could coastal governments and
landowners offset the cost of beach enhancement & sand replacement
with CO2-sequestering sand? It would not have to optimally efficient
to be substantial.
On the face of it, getting permitted to use olivine on beaches seems a
huge hurdle, but there is a already a tremendous amount of stirring-up
of shallow coastal waters, budgeted and permitted. Transportation has
already been arranged. Based on my familiarity of the Jersey Shore,
coastal towns throw enough money at replacing sand that will quickly
erode away, so why not put it to some long-term use? (Perhaps Atlantic
City's unemployed croupiers can be sent out stirring the beaches). I
have no idea how to calculate the potential scale, but perhaps this
has already been done.
Convince homeowners' associations to link CDR to property values and
you've harnessed an unstoppable force...
And is dredging relevant here? Talk about mass-handling.
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