Colorado School of Mines experts to study feasibility of storing carbon in Alaskan mining waste

A view of Alaska Energy Metals' project in Alaska, where Colorado School of Mines experts will study carbon sequestration in mine waste.Photo byCourtesy Alaska Energy Metals

The Colorado School of Mines is teaming up with Virginia Tech and an Alaskan mining company to study the potential for storing carbon in rock waste.

The company, Alaska Energy Metals, said Wednesday experts from the schools will use money from an Energy Department grant to find out how much carbon that waste from the company’s nickel-copper-cobalt project in Alaska can sequester.

“We are extremely excited to engage in this partnership with Alaska Energy Metals on a real-life project that will potentially provide a secure domestic source of energy-related metals while simultaneously sequester carbon to slow global warming,” said Thomas Monecke, professor of economic geology with the Colorado School of Mines, which is located in Golden.

After mining companies extract ore from the ground, they separate the valuable minerals from waste rock, known as tailings.

In the case of the Alaska Energy Metals project the universities will be studying, the type of rock that hosts nickel is known to be able to capture a significant amount of carbon dioxide.

The project contains nickel, copper and cobalt, which are all important for the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. They are used in electric vehicle and grid-scale batteries and renewable energy projects.

Meanwhile carbon sequestration, which is the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, holds the potential to further reduce the amount of the planet-warming greenhouse gas in the air.

“U.S. domestic mining is essential for both the electrical energy expansion and for U.S. national security,” Alaska Energy Metals CEO Gregory Beischer said. “For these reasons, we have intentionally begun to study and assess the use of modern technological innovations like … mine tailings carbonation at the early stages of the development phase of our project.”