With support from the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems and the NSF 2026 Program in the Office of Integrated Activities, Professors Lingwall, Sani, and Ustunisik and their team at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology explore biologically accelerated carbon mineralization processes in cation rich rock formations. One approach for mitigating excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, a factor that contributes to extreme weather and wildfires, is to reduce excessive CO2 levels by capture and storage. However, storage runs the risk that CO2 injected underground as a fluid can migrate and escape. Fortunately, nature has provided a solution through carbonate mineralization in deep rock, which has recently been shown to sequester large quantities of CO2. This award develops laboratory data that would be needed for the design of a potentially high-capacity, long-term carbon sequestration system. As opposed to other processes that rely on fluid CO2 to stay contained below a caprock, this system stores the carbon in the rock as part of the rock itself. A future benefit of such a system is that, as opposed to fracking which induces seismicity, this can be used to reduce seismicity through binding of deep faults. Another potential impact of such technology, if deployed at scale, would be to contribute to sustainability and resilience by reducing extreme weather and wildfire risks. The educational goal of the project is to create interest and curiosity among a diverse range of students by developing demonstrations on greenhouse gas biomineralization.
The team?s recent work in biomineralization and the evaluation of recent demonstrations shows that biology accelerates carbon mineralization in basalts. Moreover, natural and injected recovery brines at depth contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium, providing additional cation sources. Thus, the team has the opportunity to identify natural processes for sequestration via carbonate mineralization from either bioaugmentation or biostimulation in deep rock. This award is to perform laboratory experiments using extremophiles from the database of biomineralizing microbes to observe and measure this phenomenon. The goal of this project is to produce unique data on microbially accelerated carbon sequestration through laboratory core scale bioaugmentation and biostimulation experiments at appropriate temperatures and pressures. In this research, various extremophiles known to initiate biomineralization will be tested for the conversion of liquid CO2 into calcite polymorphs in deep basalt environments. This project has four principle components: 1) select and characterize rock to be optimal candidates; 2) select biomineralizing extremophiles that can tolerate the pH induced by CO2 injection; 3) study the mineralization of these rocks with CO2 without microbes; and 4) study the biomineralization of these microbes through biostimulation or bioaugmentation. This work is transdisciplinary in nature and is a convergence of expertise from geologic sciences, engineering, and microbiology to use different instruments and methods across conventional disciplinary boundaries.
This project further explores the concepts emerged from several NSF 2026 Idea Machine winning topics: Bioinspired energy utilization; Engineered living materials; Geomimicry; Global microbiome in a changing world; Public carbon capture and sequestration; and Terraforming earth.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
