https://e360.yale.edu/features/concrete-carbon-capture-germany
"Bernd Soboll’s favorite spot at his workplace — a cement plant 30 miles north
of Hamburg — is an open-air platform almost 300 feet high. From here, the
construction manager can see all the steps that go into making the material
that has made the modern world possible — its roads, bridges, airports, houses,
and skyscrapers.
Near the horizon, a bucket wheel excavator churns through a limestone quarry.
From there, chalk is transported to a drying plant, then mixed and ground into
a fine powder. This so-called “raw meal” is then pumped up the large tower that
holds the viewing platform. While falling back down in large pipes, the chalk
is heated until it enters a rotating kiln that reaches 1,500 degrees Celsius.
Cement — a gray powder that acts as a glue when mixed with sand, gravel, and
water — is the key ingredient for concrete, the world’s most widely used
man-made material. It’s also one of its most problematic, climate-wise. Since
the early days of the industrial revolution, coal and other fossil fuels have
been used to heat cement kilns to 1,500 degrees. And when limestone is
incinerated to form clinker, the precursor to cement, it releases carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere. Thousands of plants around the world produce some
4 billion tons of cement a year, generating between 5 and 8 percent of global
greenhouse gas emissions, a share larger than that of the entire aviation
industry.
For makers of cement, finding ways to shrink their carbon footprints, even as
demand soars, can’t happen soon enough.
“We’re emitting close to 1 million tons of CO₂ per year from our plant” in
Lägerdorf, Soboll says. But perhaps not for too much longer. Last April,
Holcim, the owner of the plant and one of the largest building materials
companies in the world, broke ground on a project that costs several hundred
million U.S. dollars and aims to convert the Lägerdorf campus, by 2028, into
one of the world’s first carbon-neutral cement plants by capturing its CO₂
emissions."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/276-nauseously-optimistic/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
