Prof. Frank McDermott (UCD) will talk on Chemical Weathering as a Strategy for the Large-Scale Capture and Storage of Atmospheric CO2.​

Abstract

Chemical weathering acts as an important, but imperfect, thermostat that has maintained Earth’s surface temperature within a broad range over much of geological time. On human timescales, however, this natural thermostat is far too sluggish to remove the ~35 billion tonnes of CO2 that humans now inject into the atmosphere every year. The question explored in this talk is whether large-scale engineered, enhanced chemical weathering could and should be used to remove gigatonne quantities of CO2 annually from the atmosphere. This question is increasingly important because it is now recognized that active removal of atmospheric CO2, in tandem with drastic reductions in emissions, may be essential to achieve “net-zero” by 2050, a critical requirement to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees centigrade.

Frank McDermott – Biography

Professor Frank McDermott is currently Head of Geology at University College Dublin and has been lecturing at the department since 1996. Frank is a geochemist with broad interests in aqueous and low-temperature geochemistry, mineral weathering, isotope geology and U-series dating methods, palaeoclimatology, atmospheric processes and energy meteorology. His PhD was on “Granite Petrogenesis and crustal evolution studies in the Pan-African Damara belt, Namibia” which he obtained form Open University and subsequently became a researcher for them also. Prior to his graduate study, Frank worked in the Mineral Exploration. Frank is also currently an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA and Director of the National Centre for Isotope Geochemistry (NCIG).

More info on the IGA website.