Israeli scientists make carbon capture faster and practical
Baku, December 10, AZERTAC
Scientists in Israel have found a way to speed up a natural process that normally takes thousands of years, turning it into a matter of hours, according to TPS-IL. By running carbon dioxide and seawater through common rocks such as limestone and dolomite, they created a laboratory system that locks the gas in dissolved form before it can escape into the atmosphere—a breakthrough that could help power plants and industrial facilities reduce their emissions.
“What if it were possible to take a very slow geological process and compress it into hours?” asks Noga Moran of Hebrew University, one of the study’s lead researchers. “That is exactly what we set out to do.”
In nature, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves in rainwater, forming a slightly acidic solution. This solution seeps through carbonate rocks like limestone and dolomite, reacting to form bicarbonate ions, a dissolved form of carbon that rivers eventually carry to the ocean. This process, called carbonate weathering, is one of Earth’s main ways of removing CO₂, but it occurs far too slowly to significantly counteract modern climate change.
To accelerate it, Moran, Dr. Yonaton Goldsmith from Hebrew University, and Dr. Eyal Wargaft from the Open University built a transparent reactor filled with these rocks and ran seawater and CO₂ through it. By doing so, they were able to control and measure the process, effectively compressing millennia of natural carbon capture into hours.
The team discovered key factors that influence efficiency. The ratio of CO₂ to seawater proved critical, gentle recycling of the gas improved reactions, and rock grain size affected both speed and total carbon dissolved. Dolomite appeared particularly promising because it does not form secondary carbonates that could release CO₂ back into the air. Currently, the system converts about 20% of introduced carbon dioxide into dissolved carbon, leaving significant room for engineering improvements.
“The goal was to understand what’s really happening when carbonate rocks encounter high levels of carbon dioxide,” Moran explains. “Once we figured out the conditions that allowed the process to work efficiently, we could see how something natural and slow becomes a controlled process that can be measured and tuned.”
The findings — published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science & Technology — may provide a practical roadmap for replicating natural carbon capture in engineered systems that could help reduce emissions from power plants, industrial operations, and other sources of CO₂.
Power plants, which are among the largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions globally, could benefit directly from this accelerated carbon capture method. By installing reactors that run CO₂ and seawater through limestone or dolomite, plants could convert a portion of their emissions into dissolved carbon before it reaches the atmosphere, offering a nature-based alternative to conventional capture technologies.
Industrial facilities that produce significant CO₂ — such as cement, steel, and chemical plants — could also adopt this approach. The reactor system could capture carbon from process gases and convert it into bicarbonate ions, mimicking natural geological processes. Because it relies on abundant and inexpensive materials, including common rocks and seawater, the method has the potential to be scaled and adapted across different industries, helping reduce the carbon footprint of major industrial operations.
“The promise of this approach is that it takes something Earth has done for millions of years and makes it work at human timescales,” Moran said. “It’s an exciting step toward practical, nature-based carbon capture.”
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