The storage of carbon in mining wastes has dropped off the radar of regulators and mining companies over the past decade. But now it’s back in a big way.
, where the character played by actor Tom Cruise is inspired to stay up late writing his manifesto for the future of his industry.
For an environmental scientist hired to measure, report and reduce greenhouse gas emissions within BHP’s WA nickel division, this was a revelation.Samantha Langley at BHP’s Kwinana nickel refinery. At those levels, the dam would be storing more carbon each year than the collective emissions from BHP’s flagship iron ore division and its WA nickel division.“How did I not know? How did I miss this?”
“The Clean Energy Regulator is currently developing a carbon capture, use and storage method. Mineral carbonation is currently being considered as a potential activity under the CCUS method. The CCUS method is due to be finalised by February 2023,” said a spokesman for the regulator.One of the reasons that lawmakers didn’t prioritise mineral carbonation as a carbon-reduction measure over the past decade is because of perceptions it was a prohibitively expensive technology.
Langley says many of the cost estimates that turned regulators off mineral carbonation aren’t applicable to Mt Keith, where the cost of bringing suitable geology to surface is already funded by selling nickel. The simplest way to describe the chemical reaction that occurs at Mt Keith is that magnesium oxide in the dam interacts with carbon dioxide to form magnesium carbonate.
“As we sell our nickel, we may be able to sell offsets and things like that. So, there’s lots of opportunities to look at how we can commercialise this,” she says of the carbon credits the Mt Keith dam may in future generate for BHP.A novel concept at BHP Langley was unable to share BHP’s cost estimates as the company was still studying methods that would enable the Mt Keith dam to achieve its full potential as a carbon sink.
Langley says if BHP could carbonate all the brucite in the dam, it would store 400,000 tonnes of carbon per year, 10 times the current levels.Salvation from a tailings dam would be a novel concept at BHP, after the company had its reputation shredded by a tailings dam failure in Brazil in 2015, which sent a tidal wave of sludge down a valley, destroyed towns and killed 19 people.
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