Environment & climate
Industrial processes are responsible for pumping vast amounts of carbon emission into the Earth’s atmosphere. At Aalto University, Professor Mika Järvinen’s research group is conducting pioneering research into carbon fixation which the could benefit both commercial industry and the environment
Marketing mineral carbonation
It has taken a huge amount of creative thinking to come up with feasible solutions to the planet’s enormous output of carbon dioxide,
but even the most attractive
approaches have their limitations. Efforts to reduce the skyward flow of CO2
into the
atmosphere have cast eyes downwards to the ground beneath our feet and to the sediments at the ocean’s deep, but with concerns over acidification, deep sea storage certainly has its detractors. Geological formations hold promise for the sheer volume and length of time that CO2 can be kept underground, though given the relative infancy of these activities there are currently no ways of making accurate long-term predictions of the method’s feasibility. At the turn of the millennium, the city
of Weyburn in Saskatchewan, Canada, became home to the first commercial implementation of carbon capture and storage (CSS) methods in a bid to increase oil production in the region. A worrying report in 2011, however, found dead animals, algal blooms and gas bubbles occurring in a well near the injection point, though the two things have not been irrefutably linked. In Helsinki, a group of engineers at Aalto University are seeking to exploit the potential of mineral carbonation to develop a sustainable and environmentally friendly method for the procurement and storage of CO2 At
. Aalto University’s School of
Engineering, the Energy Engineering and Environmental Protection research group is a hive of activity currently engaged in a diverse range of pursuits. A considerable portion of the group’s work entails the modelling of power plants and other industrial processes, such as iron and steel making, as well as biomass processing (where a parallel project
in
waste biomass has allowed the group to begin
building their own circulatory
fluidised-bed waste gasifier). In collaboration with Brazil’s University of Sao Paolo and Åbo Akademi University, the team at Aalto are contributing their
78 Insight Publishers | Projects
modelling expertise to state-of-the-art research
into the supercritical water
gasification of biomass with the intention of developing a process that could work in real life. “Perhaps the oldest research topic that
we’ve been working on is related to black- liquor,” states Järvinen, the group’s leader and
associate professor in energy
technology. “We’ve studied the spraying and combustion of black liquor since 1989 and might be the only group in the world
at the moment doing this research.” Since the early 2000s when Ron Zevenhoven began research into CO2
mineralisation,
the group have been focusing their efforts on novel ways of capturing and storing CO2
in order to limit the damaging
consequences of a changing climate. It was 2004 when Sebastain Teir of
Aalto first had the idea of producing PCC from steelmaking slags and CO2
, and by
2011, Aalto University Foundation, together with Åbo Akademi and
Upper row from left: Timo Laukkanen, Sanni Eloneva and Seppo Poimuvirta Lower row from left: Pertti Kiiski, Mika Järvinen, Arshe Said and Vadim Desyatnyk
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