Dubai: ADNOC will expand its ‘carbon-to-rock’ project in Fujairah after a pilot run met targets successfully. What the technology does is help reduce carbon content.
The Abu Dhabi energy giant and its partner for the project, 44.01, permanently mineralized 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) within Fujairah’s peridotite rock formations in under 100 days. Now, this will be scaled to injecting more than 300 tonnes of CO2 to ‘demonstrate the potential of the technology to be deployed at scale in the UAE’.
Fujairah was selected for this pilot due to its abundance of peridotite, a form of rock that naturally reacts with CO2 to mineralize it.
At scale, peridotite mineralization could eliminate billions of tons of carbon emissions, helping decarbonize vital industries and remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
"The carbon conversion project in Fujairah marks a significant step toward a more sustainable future,” said Engineer Ali Qasem, Director General of the Fujairah Natural Resources Corporation.
“The presence of peridotite formations in Fujairah offers unique potential to implement projects like this on a large scale, helping us reduce our carbon footprint and support environmental strategies.”
How carbon-to-rock works
The CO2 is captured directly from the atmosphere, dissolved in seawater and injected into peridotite formations deep underground, where it mineralized. This ensures the CO2 cannot escape back into the atmosphere. The first phase of the scale-up will build on this process.
As part of ADNOC’s carbon management strategy, it is targeting a carbon capture capacity of 10 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) by 2030 - which is equivalent to taking over 2 million internal combustion vehicles off the road. The company's committed investment for carbon capture capacity is at nearly 4 mtpa.
