Carbon Accounting for Enhanced Weathering

Thorben Amann, Jens Hartmann Abstract The inevitable deployment of negative emission technologies requires carbon accounting to incentivise the investment and to foster an active CO2 certificate trading schema. Enhanced Weathering as one of the negative emission technologies is being tested in the field now, but lacks a verifiable and cost-effective carbon accounting approach. Based on results from a lab scale column experiment and field observations, it is hypothesized that the observed stable positive correlation between total alkalinity and electrical conductivity may present a way to easily predict the initial CO2 sequestration at the ...

Potential and costs of carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering of rocks

Jessica Strefler, Thorben Amann, Nico Bauer, Elmar Kriegler and Jens Hartmann Abstract The chemical weathering of rocks currently absorbs about 1.1 Gt CO2 a−1 being mainly stored as bicarbonate in the ocean. An enhancement of this slow natural process could remove substantial amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, aiming to offset some unavoidable anthropogenic emissions in order to comply with the Paris Agreement, while at the same time it may decrease ocean acidification. We provide the first comprehensive assessment of economic costs, energy requirements, technical parameterization, and global and regional carbon removal potential. The ...