Going deep: Can CO ₂ be locked away below the seafloor?

When it comes to preventing the worst effects of climate change on our planet, it is clear that two things need to happen: we need to lower our current greenhouse gas emissions, and we need to remove existing excess CO ₂ permanently from the atmosphere. How to do the latter has been unclear—until now. Kate Moran, a science professor at the University of Victoria, thinks there is “a tremendous opportunity” to permanently store carbon emissions in ocean basalt (a type of volcanic rock) off the western coast of Vancouver Island. The catch? “It’s under three kilometres of water,” she says.

Moran is the nominated principal investigator for “Solid Carbon: The Ocean’s Rock-solid Sociotechnical Climate Solution,” a groundbreaking project that was recently awarded $24 million from the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).

The project capitalizes on the fact that CO ₂ reacts with basalt, which changes it from a gas to solid rock, allowing for safe, permanent storage beneath the sub-seafloor. The Solid Carbon research team hopes to demonstrate this storage process using existing infrastructure at the well-studied Cascadia Basin off the west coast of British Columbia. This site boasts a large repository of ocean basalt and already has Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) monitoring equipment on site. Moran is also the president and CEO of ONC, an initiative of the University of Victoria.

The “light bulb moment”

This transformative project has been years in the making.

Dave Goldberg, a co-principal investigator based at Columbia University, remembers his own lightbulb moment—or at least, when the lightbulb started to flicker. He was on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1997, measuring an old borehole that was drawing ocean water down into the basement rocks “at an incredible rate.” News was coming in over the teletype about the Kyoto Protocol negotiations—where countries were making commitments to decarbonize the atmosphere—which piqued his interest as a research scientist.

“That was the moment for me. It’s like, ‘Okay, the ocean basement may be a place to safely store CO ₂ , but how would that work with natural water flow? How would a storage site in international waters be handled?’”

Nearly 30 years later, the idea of storing large amounts of secure CO ₂ in ocean basalt has come a long way, to the brink of possibility—and it’s generating a lot of excitement across different disciplines.

“Solid Carbon has a diverse team that includes engineers, geoscientists, historians, economists and social scientists,” Moran says. “We’re committed to this project because of the urgency of climate change.”

Gaining public trust

For the last eight years, the ONC team has been building public awareness with its “ Put it back ” campaign, while also conducting feasibility research using a socially responsible approach. With this new funding, the Solid Carbon team will be able to take this work even further.

Terre Satterfield, a University of British Columbia social scientist, is the Solid Carbon team’s lead on regulatory, societal and Indigenous community engagement, which is central to the project. This includes large-scale survey work and more fine-grained community engagement—explaining the process of carbon dioxide removal and inviting conversations about how people view the technology.

“This will evolve over time to more nuanced design questions. Conversations will evolve to bring clarity to how any impacts and benefits might unfold,” Satterfield says. “One question is, What are the conditions of operation? Because it’s not just about the technology; it’s about who’s operating it, do they trust who’s operating it, do they have the right people on board?”

Moran adds, “Even if we get everything right technically, there’s no way we can move forward without meaningfully bringing all stakeholders, including the public, along with us.”

Turning an idea into reality

The Solid Carbon project uses six proven technologies within a fully integrated offshore system. CO ₂ extracted from the atmosphere or seawater will be transported with the help of a remotely operated vehicle down below the ocean floor, where it will transform the CO ₂ into stable rock through mineralization.

All the action will be captured and recorded on video that anyone is free to view online, in real time.

“A ship at the surface will deploy a remotely operated vehicle, a robot. You will be able to actually hear the pilots talking and explaining what they’re doing—driving the robots to the location, plugging in the CO ₂ , starting the pumps, and turning on monitoring systems,” Moran says. “It’s like NASA, but at the bottom of the ocean.”

Goldberg is hopeful that this real-time video connectivity and site monitoring will help engage the public so they, too, can participate in project decision-making.

“That’s the tool that will, in my mind, make public acceptance happen,” he says. “And public acceptance and regulatory acceptance are closely related—it’s a two-way street.”

In six years when the NFRF funding concludes, Moran hopes that a successful Solid Carbon demonstration, and the intellectual property generated, will position Canada as a leader in this emerging field.

“Solid Carbon intends to leverage the energy sector’s expertise and technology, much of which was developed and led in Canada, to advance the world’s largest reservoir for carbon dioxide sequestration, ocean basalt, to combat the climate crisis,” Moran says. “There’s no reason why this transition of energy expertise to new, clean tech careers couldn’t be the next chapter of that story.”