Mineralisation: Locking Carbon into Rock and Building Materials

Mineralisation is a removal pathway in which carbon dioxide reacts with alkaline minerals or industrial residues to form stable carbonate compounds that store carbon for geological timescales. It belongs to the field of Carbon Credits, where careful definitions shape how credits are issued, compared, traded, and retired.

Carbon dioxide is brought into contact with crushed rock, mine tailings or alkaline waste, either in a reactor or underground. The reaction forms carbonates, which are stable solids. Operators measure the mass of carbonates produced and the carbon dioxide consumed, then verify that the material is stored durably rather than re-emitted. Because the reaction is exothermic and geologically stable, the main engineering challenge is contact between carbon dioxide and reactive mineral surfaces, which is why pre-treatment and particle size matter so much.

Because the product is a solid mineral, storage does not depend on keeping gas underground or on land management over centuries. That makes mineralisation one of the more durable removal routes, suited to offsetting hard-to-abate emissions. Durability is the attraction: carbonate minerals are stable over geological time, so the credit does not depend on a buffer pool or on a community continuing a practice for decades. Getting Mineralisation right is not a semantic exercise; it decides whether climate claims hold up to scrutiny and whether capital reaches credible work.

Practical experience with Mineralisation tends to reward patience and discipline: the organisations that document their assumptions, keep an audit trail, and revisit their methods are the ones that keep credibility when questions are asked.

The energy needed for grinding and transport can erode the net benefit, and measurement of carbon uptake in heterogeneous materials is difficult. If carbonate products are later heated in cement production, some of the carbon can be released again. Feedstock availability also constrains scale, since suitable alkaline minerals and residues are unevenly distributed and often far from where carbon dioxide is captured.

CarbonFi requires mineral mass balance and product fate evidence for mineralisation credits, and ties issuance to verified carbonate formation rather than to the volume of feedstock processed. CarbonFi also tracks where the carbonate product ends up, because a credit is only durable if the material is not subsequently processed in a way that releases the carbon. CarbonFi approaches Mineralisation by combining independent verification, a transparent registry, and open market rails, so that the concept translates into verifiable, auditable action rather than a marketing claim.