Innovation March-April 2023

F E A T U R E

THE PERFECT LOCATION TO STUDY Moran is president of the University of Victoria’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) initiative, which collects deep-sea, coastal, and land-based data along hundreds of kilometres

of ocean, including in the Cascadia Basin. It operates the NEPTUNE and VENUS cabled ocean observatories in the northeast Pacific Ocean. About seven years ago, Columbia University professor Dave Goldberg contacted ONC regarding a proposal to the U.S. department of energy for a pre-feasibility study to assess basalt at Cascadia as a possible reservoir for sequestering CO 2 . Goldberg considered the location the best site in the world to understand whether it was possible. ONC had been collecting seismic and other data at the Cascadia Basin for four decades and was a perfect partner for the project. “From a geological perspective, we understand this site better than any other ocean basalt covered by sediment site in the world,” said Moran. (Decades of global emissions could also be stored there for the project to move forward on a large scale.) The results of the study, dubbed "CarbonSAFE," were seen as very positive. It built on research from Iceland showing carbon can be made solid in as little as two years. Through a naturally occurring process, basalts, which are high in calcium and magnesium ions, chemically react with CO 2 to make calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. infrastructure in this area could draw more researchers from around the world. “We’d become the intellectual hub of this in BC,” she said. “The one thing about our location, too, is that the kind of people you would need to grow this into a truly new industry—which I think it will be—are really the kind of skills that we already have in BC in the oil and gas sector. It could be a really wonderful Solid Carbon is now four years into a full feasibility study, and the team has quadrupled. Moran said building up Canadian

Kate Moran, P.Eng., one of the project leads for Solid Carbon. P hoto : O cean N etworks C anada

way to bridge these kinds of workers from a carbon-intensive extractive industry to a really truly sustainable industry.” Moran said it’s important that monitoring be developed alongside sequestration to prevent carbon fraud. There will be lots of data collected at the site, as well as cameras for the curious. HI-TECH WASTE DISPOSAL Another lead on the project, Dr. Curran Crawford, P. Eng., is responsible for the systems engineering. His team is working on the conceptual design. Crawford, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Victoria, said they are currently looking at the various components required, including wind energy and direct-air capture. They’re considering a tanker ship or a pipeline to send CO 2 to the sequestration site in the basalt. The anticipated timeline is: on-site demonstration within two to four years; a prototype within five to 10 years; and, if all goes well, wide-scale deployment by 2040. Crawford likened it to waste disposal.

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