Oregon geologist looks to volcanic rock to store carbon dioxide as tool to fight climate change

Columbia River Basin basalt cliffs in Washington. (Dan Coe/Washington Geological Survey)

Layers of volcanic rock in eastern Oregon, the Willamette Valley and the Columbia Basin have created fertile soil for farming and ranching, but in the future it could provide fruitful ground for a whole other industry designed to fight climate change.

Oregon’s state geologist is pitching a novel idea of using the region’s rocky basalt layer – born of lava that flowed millions of years ago from cracks in the Earth’s crust –  to be a bank for storing planet-warming carbon dioxide.

Ruarri Day-Stirrat, state geologist and executive director of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, discussed the potential for geologic carbon sequestration at a State Land Board meeting in Salem last month, and will seek funding to begin investigating potential sites in eastern Oregon. It involves using machines to capture carbon dioxide from the air or to capture it directly from a source like a big livestock operation or a factory, turning it into a solid mineral and storing it in rocky layers deep in the earth. The strategy is still a very new one, and so far not cost-effective or scalable in the fight against climate change. But places like Oregon, Washington and Iceland that have lots of volcanic rock are unique in their potential to store carbon deep underground.

“At the moment, it’s definitely in that seed idea,” Day-Stirrat told the Capital Chronicle. “We want to drill a stratigraphic test well to understand whether it’s even plausible – not even feasible – but plausible.”

At the encouragement of the State Land Board – which includes Gov. Tina Kotek, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade and state Treasurer Tobias Read – he’ll present the idea to the state Legislature in January and start to raise funding.

There’s potential to store more than 14,000 megatons of carbon dioxide in the basalt beneath Oregon and Washington, according to a 2013 U.S. Geological Survey study. That’s equivalent to more than 200 years worth of carbon dioxide emissions from Oregonians and Oregon industry. In eastern Oregon, quite a bit of that rocky layer is deep beneath land owned by the state, which is where Day-Stirrat sees the greatest potential for development.

But it’s expensive to drill and develop a project, and could be counterintuitive to the mission of reducing pollution and slowing climate change if energy must be used to capture the carbon dioxide, mineralize it and to inject it into the ground. Modeling from the En-ROADS simulator developed by the nonprofit Climate Interactive and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that direct carbon capture and storage is not the most effective way to spend money in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it would be far more effective in the next 75 years to spend money to decarbonize the energy sector and to tax polluters. 

“We should be investigating a lot of different solutions. And yes, each project has more or less cost. And at the moment, we’re probably doing all the cheap ones, and they’re cheap for a reason,” Day-Stirrat said.

Northwest projects

Some direct air capture and geologic carbon storage projects are already underway. In the Dalles, Google is building its own $20 million direct carbon capture facility. The University of Wyoming is also running a test project near Hermiston, with more than $10 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to eventually capture carbon dioxide emissions from a natural gas plant, mineralize them and inject them into underground basalt. 

In those facilities, a chemical filter grabs or locks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and holds onto it until it is isolated, turned to a solid and then injected into the earth.

Test projects are also happening in Washington, and a consortium that includes the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based climate nonprofit, and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries is trying to create a direct carbon capture and storage hub in the Northwest.

To initiate a project in eastern Oregon, Day-Stirrat said his agency needs to be able to drill more than 3,500 feet beneath the ground to see how deep the water table is, where water flow zones are and if there are any plausible areas to store mineralized carbon and if it’s possible to get the mineralized carbon that deep. Standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency do not allow any geologic carbon sequestration to happen in an area where water could be compromised, Day-Stirrat said. 

“Direct air capture still has a ways to go. But there’s a lot of research and development money going into understanding the technology and what the scale up globally could look like,” he said. 

Day-Stirrat, 45, said he expects in his lifetime to see it used as a tool for reducing emissions and slowing the worst outcomes of climate change.

“I’d be disappointed if it doesn’t,” he said.