Life Cycle Assessment of the Energy Consumption of Olivine Powder Production for Enhanced Weathering using the Mine-to-Mill Approach

Enhanced weathering, a negative-emissions technology that involves spreading finely grounded silicate rocks to accelerate carbon sequestration, is critical to achieving a net-zero climate future. However, there are concerns related to the uncertainty of the balance of CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> emissions to mine, crush, grind, transport, and spread powdered rocks, and the potential carbon dioxide removal. The research aims to estimate the energy consumption across the entire silicate rock powder production chain by utilizing the extraction simulator software to design and model the integrated mine-to-mill process. The analysis scope includes blasting, crushing, primary grinding, and secondary fine grinding. The circuit performance was evaluated for two blasting scenarios: ordinary and intense. The novelty of this study includes the simulation of the entire mine-to-mill process to estimate the specific energy consumption of olivine powder production. This study contributes to the Life Cycle Assessment of technology by improving the scope and accuracy of the analysis.