Abstract
Ensuring the large-scale feasibility of carbon mineralization in ultramafic mine tailings will gravitate two positive impacts toward green mining. The first one is lowering greenhouse gas emissions from mining operations. The second one is utilizing extensive amounts of tailings as a feedstock to store the captured carbon permanently. For fossil fuel-dependent off-grid mines, flue gas injection in mine tailings can enhance the carbon sequestration process significantly. The techno-economic feasibility of such accelerated carbon sequestration via injection of diesel generator exhaust through buried pipes into dry stack tailings in remote mines heavily depends on understanding or controlling the pressure profile inside the embedded perforated injection pipes. Two distinctive yet dynamically coupled transport phenomena were identified to occur in this case: i) transport of flue gas inside the pipe and ii) flue gas injection into the porous body of the tailings through the perforations. The effect of perforations on the pressure profile was evaluated, and a fluid flow model, along with a guide map, was populated to estimate that. Experimental investigations of the pressure profile through the injection pipe were carried out to verify the validity of the performance of the developed model. The accuracy of the established model was found to be in line with the results obtained from commercial software but with significantly less computational resources and time. A pathway to attain a pressure and energy-optimum injection design scenario was determined by the established numerical model.