(Source: MIRS.news, Published 11/27/2023) A new four-year, $3 million grant could make Michigan’s impressive rock repository more impressive.
Michigan Geological Survey Director John Yellich said the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy grant would be used for an expanded warehouse for the $20 billion worth of rock core measuring up to 600,000 feet.
The goal is to use the samples to help train the next generation of geoscientists looking to fight climate change and bolster clean energy expansion.
“We could be the green machine, by going ahead and identifying where we can store carbon and potentially where we could store hydrogen,” Yellich said.
He said the United States is focused on doing something about climate change. The rock samples are used to teach how carbon sequestration can put carbon back into the earth while finding ways to store hydrogen.
“That’s the reason why this facility and training the students is so invaluable, because the education that people need for the oil industry, understanding what the subsurface was, is the same education that they need for the green climate change,” he said.
Michigan is the country's number one storage facility for natural gas, Yellich said, and the same rock formations that make that possible are also suitable to potentially pipe carbon from the atmosphere back in. He said the new training center would help identify chemical changes.
He said the Michigan Geological Survey recently received two grants to start looking at different areas to seal up that carbon.
Yellich said the survey had recently received funding from the state government that would allow them to map out the aggregates, which would go beyond just identifying areas suitable for infrastructure-building gravel pits.
The areas where aggregates are near the surface also represents areas where water is recharged.
Hydrogen storage also has potential for utilizing the different rock formations in the state.
“We haven’t looked at this, because nobody has looked at it before, but potentially we can generate hydrogen and that’s what we need to find out,” he said.
He said Michigan has the potential to be able to generate hydrogen on the surface and then inject it into the ground to use later.
“The aggregates, carbon sequestration, that’s our rocks, and of course our hydrogen storage and water in Michigan. It all has to do with geology,” he said.
Yellich said Michigan Geological Survey started looking for a new facility location two years ago in case its leased core storage facility couldn’t accommodate them by the time the lease ends in 2026.
He said the biggest problem would be the ceiling sizes, because they needed 24 feet for their rock collection, which consists of cores from major Michigan universities, oil and gas exploration and other areas like the Gordie Howe International Bridge.
“We have core from the very first Mackinac Bridge cores that were drilled,” he said.
He said the concrete floor would also need to be reinforced to take the weight, the location would need to be fireproof, and they would need to make sure bugs couldn’t get into the samples.
It also needed to be accessible, because students from every major university in Michigan used the repository for research.
He said the geological survey was experiencing a problem with workers and had restarted the outreach program for middle and high school students across the state. Undergraduate students were also being targeted for geoscience careers.
“It’s really the education part. We need future geoscientists to go to work because a lot of us, of course, are near the end of our careers and we need other people to pick it up, because carbon sequestration is not just going to be a one-year project,” Yellich said.
