Addressing climate change means finding new strategies for carbon capture. Many of these, like kelp farming, focus on absorbing carbon back into our natural environment. Icelandic startup Carbfix is taking on this same challenge, but rather than use plants, it’s putting carbon back into the ground by turning it into stone.
Carbfix was founded in 2007 by Reykjavik Energy and several research institutions. The basis for their stone-making process is to capture CO2 from industrial sites, dissolve it in water, and inject it into the ground where it becomes rock.
The technique essentially replicates natural carbon storage but accelerates the process to produce stone from CO2 in just two years. With Carbfix technology, a factory can effectively bring its net emissions to zero by not just offsetting carbon emissions, but redirecting and eliminating them altogether. Carbfix has also partnered with Swiss company Cimeworks to perform the actual carbon capture process.
Carbfix says its process is both environmentally-friendly and affordable, making it a feasible climate change solution that could be widely adopted to reduce carbon emissions. We are eager to see how this solution gets scaled up in the future.
