What do you think about other ideas for sequestering CO2 – like spreading crushed silicate rocks over the desert, or making cement from natural dolime?
A number of other sequestration ideas have been advocated, but none seems likely to be cost effective. One that has received far more attention than it deserves is grinding certain igneous rocks into fine sand and dusting them over hundreds of thousands of square miles of the deserts. Many abundant magnesium silicates, such as olivines and serpentines, are in a higher energy state than their carbonates and thus they will naturally (but extremely slowly) react with CO2 to form the solid carbonates. We calculated that it would take several hundred thousand years to see any benefit – see geo-engineering. Naturally, there would be adverse environmental effects, both at the enormous rock quarries and in the deserts, as most of these magnesium silicates poison soils from their high chromium and nickel contents. A variation on the above theme that avoids spreading the dust over deserts and speeds up the reaction from hundreds of thousands of years to days is pulverizing the sand to an extreme
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