De Beers CarbonVault Workshop

It was a fantastic day at DeBeers’ Calgary office for the last CarbonVault workshop! Thanks to De Beers and all their staff, Alison from Lorax Environmental, the postdocs and students who contributed amazing research, and my collaborators at the University of Alberta, Queensland University, and the University of British Columbia! In the past 7 years, we pushed forward CO2 removal using mine wastes, and developed new technologies and carbon verification methods. At Trent University, we developed new techniques for assessing mine waste reactivity with CO2 and demonstrated that particular mine wastes remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We also developed geochemical models for determining baseline carbonation rates using existing mine water chemical data and showed how pre-existing carbonates present challenges for carbon verification. Finally, our work has demonstrated that mine wastes from diamond mines have the potential to be used for enhanced weathering as part of mine closure, remediation and revegetation, which could lead to substantial CO2 removal.