Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are partnering with Toronto-based Canada Nickel to launch a 1-month in-situ carbon-injection pilot at the Crawford Nickel Project located 43 km north of Timmins, Ontario.
The project is partially funded by the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E team and will be led by UT Austin Research Associate Professor Estibalitz Ukar.
"We have been very pleased to work with Ukar and her team at the University of Texas at Austin as they developed a novel carbon-sequestration approach to store large volumes of CO2 and create the potential, by pre-carbonating material before it is mined, to both reduce the costs and to improve the value from processing the material,” said Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby.
According to Canada Nickel, small-scale lab tests showed that magnesium-rich rocks at the Crawford site can capture CO2 by turning it into stable minerals. Building on that, a new month-long field trial will pump CO2-rich water into a 400-m-deep well to test if this process works at a larger scale in real conditions.
The carbon is expected to start turning into rock within hours and mostly finish within 6 months. Scientists will monitor the process using groundwater samples, seismic sensors, gas detectors, and satellite tracking.