New materials can selectively capture carbon dioxide, UCLA chemists report
“For each liter of ZIF, you can hold 83 liters of carbon dioxide,” Banerjee said.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/new-materials-can-selectively-45139.aspx

The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome. Now we have structures that can be tailored precisely to capture carbon dioxide and store it like a reservoir, as we have demonstrated. No carbon dioxide escapes. Nothing escapes—unless you want it to do so. We believe this to be a turning point in capturing carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/02/zifs-new-framew.html

If coal is mined by opencut, huge holes are left in the ground. With enough rain, these might become huge lakes, like crater lakes – quite toxic effective dams.

Rewind back to the start of the year when Ensham Coal Mine near Emerald had 5 Sydney harbors dumped on it in 36 hours, busting the levees and doing just as you say. Lost coal production was intolerable, the EPA OK’d them mega-pumping into the Nagoa River, which flows into the Fitzroy. Which they did for months until in August downstream folks pointed out their water was a bit suss. At which point Qld Health said anyone on a low sodium diet and babies should avoid it at all costs. The mine stopped pumping in Sept. Anna Bligh set up an enquiry in how f’d up the Fitzroy now is, to report just after the next election by the end of the year.
Meanwhile they were still underwater, and Qld Treasury was still needing Coal royalties, so apparently they came up with the idea of using a whole lot of clean dam water to dilute the filthy mine water down to legalistically OK average concentrations and then dump it in the river and on the land , working on the theory that the overall salt load doesn’t matter. But it’s not being mixed thoroughly and the hyper-salty/mineralised stuff sinks to the bottom, and gets backed up by the weirs, hanging around doing it’s foul eco-destroying business.
Coal uber alles.

DeeCee, there’s a *lot* of basalt in the SEQ ranges. Even with a lot of it only being in caps in the hilltops, ‘flattening’ is a bit of an overstatement. The hills aren’t about to disappear even if we get really carried away. Plus, there’s an active olivine mine near Armidale already.

Not that I’m not concerned with a drive to mine the stuff locally, it would be bad, but lets keep it in perspective. EG of ‘bad-enough’ prospective damage: There’s actually a little old basalt quarry just off the road to Montville, and seeing places like that opened up to extraction again would be bad. Can’t imagine what even a small extraction project there would do to the local area D:

Coal deposits are typically found in fairly flat (formerly marsh) land, often near old sea coasts. If coal is mined by opencut, huge holes are left in the ground. With enough rain, these might become huge lakes, like crater lakes – quite effective dams.

Cut down basalt mountains for OB, and what impact does that have on rainfall & creek/ river formation? For example, flatten the OB basalt deposits of SE Qld’s Great Divide, and you knock out the headwaters of western creeks & rivers feeding the Warrego & Maranoa etc. By removing the Escarpment’s effect on rainfall that feeds rivers like the Brisbane, cities East of the Escarpment lose much of their water supply. The two Toowoomba bluestone quarries are only on the Escarpment’s dry (“rainshadow”)sides; but their clients were limited to the railway & local roads, with stone etc available for local use.

Wizofaus @ #5 The Bridge St quarry switched from blasting to high-pressure water drilling c1982. Blasting is cheaper, by has significant side-effects; water “drilling’s” most significant side-effect is water usage. I’d imagine that crushing uses a great deal of power. It, stockpiling & loading also create clouds of fine gritty dust; so when the BSt operated, the crusher-loading area was constantly watered. Had it not been closed before the current drought, it would have had to cease operations years ago.

ASS’s are a bugger to mess with

must…. resist… comment…

ASS’s are a bugger to mess with – there’s lots of compounds that can neutralise the acidity created when they’re exposed to air, but the trick lies in their solubility. The agent has to be able to sit around in the soil matrix and ‘catch’ any incoming acid. If its too soluble it’ll just wash away in the groundwater before that happens. The other thing is that some agents are *too* alkaline, and can raise the soil pH too high. The theoretical max pH that ag-lime can raise a soil to is only 8.2, and realistically it rarely gets soil above 6.5-7 (neutral). That’s why its the most common neutraliser applied to soils – it sticks around, and can’t cause too much trouble. Unfortunately, lime neutralisation releases CO2, so, problem.

Really, the ultimate solution is to stop disturbing ASS in the first place, but people will insist on their canal McMansions and marinas. *le sigh*.