How Your World Works

Among the many ideas that have been floated for slowing down climate change, carbon capture and sequestration is one of the easiest to understand: When carbon dioxide is produced - say, by a factory - you find a way to trap it, then bury it someplace where it can't get into the atmosphere and contribute to the intensifying greenhouse effect. But CO2 shoved into storage as a gas or liquid can leak, especially if, at some point in the future, we manage to lose track of all the places we put it. On today's show, Professor Martin Stute of Barnard College joins the show to talk about an alternate technique his team has already gotten working at a power plant in Iceland: through a chemical reaction, they turn the CO2 into harmless rock.