About the Seminar 

Mobilizing Earth’s Base

Renewable energy and emissions abatement technologies will need to be complemented by multi-gigaton per year (Gton/yr) atmospheric CO2 removal (CDR) to adequately address the carbon problem this century. Our planet’s crust has an inexhaustible supply of silicate-containing rocks that can remove CO2 by an acid-base reaction to form (bi)carbonates, which are stable for thousands to millions of years. This “weathering” process occurs naturally, but very slowly, when silicates contact air and water, and is estimated to account for ~0.3 Gton/yr CDR globally. Utilizing Earth’s enormous reserves of alkalinity to counteract anthropogenic emissions requires scalable technologies that greatly enhance silicate weathering. Conventional approaches to enhanced weathering (EW) consist of grinding rocks to increase their surface area and applying them to agricultural soil, where weathering is aided by the naturally elevated CO2 pressure and water flux. These approaches require very high application rates (many tons per acre) and very small particle sizes to achieve measurable CDR in a reasonable timeframe, which defy common agronomic practices and pose major barriers to scaling. In this talk, I will describe how my group is addressing these problems by developing new electrochemical and thermochemical processes to transform native silicates into minerals that weather several orders of magnitude faster. By effectively releasing the alkalinity trapped in silicates, this approach makes it possible to achieve durable CDR at a fraction of the energy demand of state-of-the-art direct air capture systems and unlocks agronomic co-benefits to help drive adoption and offset cost. I will also describe our nascent efforts to apply the chemistry of transforming silicates to other problems in sustainable resource utilization.

About the Speaker 

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2009, Matt did his undergraduate studies at Rice University, his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard, and postdoctoral research at MIT in inorganic chemistry. His research group addresses chemical and engineering challenges in energy conversion, resource utilization, and carbon management. Matt also serves as the Faculty Director of the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and is a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Host: David Dumas