Dear CMS Colleagues: Cliff Johnston, is a long term member and former President of the The Clay Minerals Society. Researchers at Purdue in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories have “unveiled a groundbreaking clay-based solution to capture carbon dioxide and combat climate change”.   Here is a link to the article: <https://www.eaps.purdue.edu/news/articles/2025/0603_co2clay_johnston.html> \ Mary Gray CMS Manager

Dear Mary. Thank you for sending the link to this interesting information along to the membership. As another long term member and former CMS President, I feel it important to point out that carbon capture and longterm storage of CO2 to combat a changing climate suffers from massive quantitative barriers that makes it’s usefulness almost nil. "Atmospheric CO2 levels are expressed in parts per million by volume (ppm). To convert from ppm to gigatonne of carbon, the conversion tables of the CDIAC, (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) advise that 1 part per million of atmospheric CO2 is equivalent to 2.13 Gigatonnes Carbon. Using the 44 over 12 rule, this means 1 ppm = 7.8 Gigatonnes of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere.” 7,800 million metric tons. Source: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/faq.html#Q6 The IEA, in a recent report identified all of the global sources, including direct air capture and bioenergy…  Their total of 7,600 million metric tons?…is not even one part-per-million. The Earth’s atmosphere, now at ~420 ppm, wouldn’t miss it. So, Cliff and his colleagues need to be aware of this major barrier if they plan to do something further with their discovery. Of course, the additional problems with mining, processing and storage of these smectite clays at scale remain. Sincerely, Ken Towe > On Jun 5, 2025, at 4:29 PM, Announce list for all CMS members <cms-announce@minlists.org> wrote: > > Dear CMS Colleagues: > > Cliff Johnston, is a long term member and former President of the The Clay Minerals Society. Researchers at Purdue in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories have “unveiled a groundbreaking clay-based solution to capture carbon dioxide and combat climate change”. > > Here is a link to the article: > > https://www.eaps.purdue.edu/news/articles/2025/0603_co2clay_johnston.html > > > Mary Gray > > CMS Manager > > _______________________________________________ > Cms-announce mailing list -- cms-announce@minlists.org > > The CMS_announce Listserv is an announce-only list serve. It was created by The Clay Minerals Society to allow the Society to send the members announcements and occasional news of the Society. Dr. Ken Towe kmtowe@gmail.com 157 Broadlands Drive Eatonton, GA 31024 706-923-0097 Mobile: 706-818-2095