Nenagh man involved in exciting carbon project
Dr Anthony Grey studying new ways of capturing greenhouse gases
A Nenagh scientist is involved in an exciting project that looks at new ways of protecting our environment from harmful greenhouse gases.
Dr Anthony Grey is a researcher in organic geochemistry at the School of Chemical Sciences in Dublin City University (DCU). He and his colleague Dr Brian Kelleher have been looking at how Dublin's Bull Island acts as a natural ‘carbon sink’ that could be used as a model for projects to capture greenhouse gases.
A son of Majella Gleeson and Dan Grey, Anthony's study was featured in the Irish Independent recently. He explained that similar locations based on the structure of Bull Island, which was formed by the dredging of Dublin port in the 19th century, could help Ireland to meet its climate targets.
“Bull Island is capturing and storing carbon – greenhouse gases – from the atmosphere,” Dr Grey told the Independent. “As well as that benefit, we can see that pollutants such as heavy metals and microplastics are being immobilised around the island, while promoting biodiversity, which is in decline in many places around Ireland.”
Dr Kelleher suggested that the use of artificially-constructed islands similar to Bull Island would be a natural and long-term solution to greenhouse gas problems, one more workable than many of the engineering solutions that have been put forward, such as underground storage. “The potential is there, we believe, for this approach to have a big impact,” he said.
Carbon enters the ecosystem around Bull Island from land and rivers, and also the sea. The particles are captured and filtered in the shallow waters around the island’s coastal wetlands.
The way they are captured and filtered is not yet understood, but the carbon becomes locked into place by minerals and clays, which prevent the carbon from combining again with oxygen and re-entering the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
“As well as removing atmospheric carbon, the muddy offshore seabed sediments along the east coast of Ireland have high capacity for carbon storage exported from land and coastal zones,” Dr Grey told the Independent.
“We believe that Bull Island and its environs could provide a workable, natural model to tackle the seemingly intractable twin problems of greenhouse gas emissions and manmade pollutants.”