Would adding pulverized granite to the fluidized combustion bed in a coal fired power plant convert the carbon dioxide to carbonate and bicarbonate, and convert the granite to silica?
This is the natural process the earth uses to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's called the weathering of rocks. This mechanism might be the cause of the earth entering it's current ice age state. When the India tectonic plate crashed into the Asian tectonic plate about 35 million years ago the Himalayan mountains resulted. This exposed so much granite to the atmosphere that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was dramatically reduced and the world entered the current ice age.
Coal fired power plants already incorporate rock into the fluidized combustion bed. They currently used pulverized limestone which removes sulfur from the waste gas. The use of pulverized granite will have some new problems to overcome. The conversion of granite (a silicate mineral) to silica will probably cause glass and slag formation and cleaning problems. But that's just a problem for the engineers to solve.
The entropy and Gibb's free energy calculations indicate that this should actually be both spontaneous and exothermic.
You heard it here first.
Bye for now, Doug
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