| Project Detail |
Improving CO2 storage with biological catalysts
Sequestering carbon dioxide emissions to prevent them from entering the atmosphere is a vital tool to help combat man-made climate change. The EU-funded CO2FOREARM project investigates how microbial catalysts can enhance such storage of CO2 in rock formations. Bringing together engineers, biologists and environmental scientists from Spain and Italy, researchers will create fluid dynamic models to simulate how stored CO2 interacts with minerals and biomass within rock formations on a microstructural level. The end goal is to use these models to understand how biological catalysts influence carbon storage and suggest how they might increase speed and reactivity on industrial scales.
Large-scale implementation of geological carbon sequestration is considered as a key strategy to limit anthropogenic warming to 1.5 – 2 °C, as set out in the Paris Agreement. I am interested in a viable alternative represented by injecting CO2 into reactive rock formations, e.g. basalts, to facilitate rapid carbon mineralization, and therefore increase storage security. My particular interest lies in microbially enhanced carbon mineralization: biological catalysts are utilized to alter reaction rates and further enhance carbon mineralization.
The overarching aim of this project’s research is to provide the fundamental understanding and simulation technology required to assess the large-scale deployment of CO2 storage through microbially enhanced carbon mineralization, and hence contribute to climate change mitigation.
The project brings together engineers, biologists and environmental scientists from Spain and Italy to undertake a comprehensive research programme comprising combined experimental, computational and theoretical investigations.
I will derive models (both at the conceptual and the numerical level) necessary to understand the dominant processes and develop a suitable simulation framework. The computational studies will employ various numerical techniques, combining multi-scale modelling and conventional CFD to investigate the flow physics and CO2-rock-biomass interactions at sub-pore levels.
Complementary experiments on flow and mineral-biomass-fluid interactions will be conducted at POLIMI aiming at characterizing biofilm growth in porous microstructures using microfluidic devices that can capture spatial flow heterogeneities and chemical gradients at the pore-scale.
The ultimate aim of the investigations is to use the new experimental and computational data to produce correlations/relationships for use with large scale simulations as well as developing further fundamental understanding of phenomena of CO2/biomass reactive flow in porous media. |
