Mineral Carbonation Technology towards Net Zero Carbon

Dear Colleagues,

Since 1850, the global climate has been warming at a faster pace than ever before. The average global temperature has risen by 1 °C in the last 100 years. The main cause of this rise in average global temperature is the burning of fossil fuels to obtain cheap energy, which emits a significant amount of greenhouse gases such as CO₂. The international consensus is that global warming should not exceed 2 °C, and efforts should be made to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial levels. To reach these goals, the global community must find affordable and practical solutions for managing carbon.

Mineral carbonation technology is one method that has been employed to permanently and safely decrease concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere. It accomplishes this by accelerating a natural weathering process in which CO₂ is chemically bound to calcium and/or magnesium silicates. To overcome the slow reaction kinetics of the natural weathering process that occur over thousands or even millions of years, mineral carbonation has several advantages and merits compared with other approaches to CCS (e.g., geological storage). First, mineral carbonation is the only option that can permanently store CO₂ without monitoring. The carbonate products are naturally abundant minerals, which are environmentally friendly and leakage-free for geologic timescales. In addition, the abundance of Mg/Ca-silicates on Earth offers an enormous capacity for sequestering CO₂. There is a wide range of materials that can be used for mineral carbonation: not only naturally occurring formations, such as olivine, serpentine, and wollastonite, but also highly reactive wastes comprised of Mg/Ca-rich materials, such as fly ash, iron and steel slags, cement kiln dust, and ultramafic mine wastes. In addition, the carbonation process generates heat by means of an exothermic reaction (Equation (1)), and the reactions can be self-perpetuated without additional energy input. Theoretically, the heat produced by exothermic carbonation can be utilized in endothermic mineral dissolution, but this has not yet been demonstrated in practice. The only drawbacks of mineral carbonation are that the reaction kinetics are often too slow, and the costs of accelerated carbonation are often too high, for it to be put into practice.

This Special Issue aims to gather contributions (in the form of research articles, letters, reviews, and communications) to update the community on developments in the areas of carbon capture and storage of CO₂ via mineral carbonation. It is intended to support future developments in the low-carbon global economy concerning net carbon emissions and the availability of reagents.

I kindly invite you to submit a contribution to this Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Mineral Carbonation Technology Towards Net Zero Carbon”.

Prof. Dr. Wen Ni
Dr. Jiajie Li
Guest Editors

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• CO₂ capture
• CO₂ mitigation
• mineral carbonation
• calcium looping/chemical looping process/chemical looping combustion
• CO₂ adsorption
• materials for CO₂ mineralization
• carbon dioxide fixation
• carbonation curing
• carbonation consolidation
• accelerated carbonation