Green Cement is Carbon Neutral, Sequesters CO2 from Power Plants

cement plant
New ideas for reducing CO2 seem to be popping up all the time. The latest scheme for getting rid of the greenhouse gas comes from Stanford Professor Brent Constanz. The Geological and Environmental Sciences Professor has invented a new type of cement that is carbon neutral—a huge innovation for a material whose production process normally spews vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Not only is Constanz’s cement carbon neutral, but it also sequesters CO2 emitted from power plants.

The details of the cement process are secret until it is patented, but Constanz reveals that it does eliminate the need to heat limestone, a major source of CO2 emissions.

In Constanz’s vision, the green cement factories are built next to power plants, and exhaust gas released from the power plants is bubbled through seawater. The resulting chemical process creates an important ingredient for the cement. It also sequesters a half ton of CO2 from the smokestacks for every ton of cement produced.

And the green cement will even be cost-effective—$100 a ton versus $110 for standard Portland cement.

If green cement goes mainstream, it will drastically reduce CO2 levels, as the cement manufacturing process currently produces 5 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions.

The faster green cement replaces regular cement, the better for our planet’s health.

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16 Comments

  1. wow, that is all that comes to my mind. If this works as promised, it would be a huge step forward for reducing the greenhouse effect. It will also lead to ancillary technologies which will have a cascading effect on other fields.

  2. You can’t just dump limitless amounts of CO2 into the worlds oceans without any ecological consequence. I hope that this is realized - it is far from ‘green’ and it is actually highly toxic to the world’s corals.

    The escalating levels of carbon dioxide will make the world’s more acidic (carbonic acid) and lowering the PH level. This will kill off the world’s corals.

    So I strongly disagree with this article. It is NOT carbon neutral. Sorry to rain on your parade.

    PS. I think that the ‘greenhouse effect’ is a total scam.

  3. Green Cement is Carbon Neutral from Power Plants | nerdd.net…

    \r\nThe Geological and Environmental Sciences Professor has invented a new type of cement that is ca…

  4. And if the power plant blows up or irradiates things. It’s still green, just a different kind.

  5. “And if the power plant blows up or irradiates things” ??? This process would be used for coal or natural gas power plants. Nuclear power plant release no CO2.

  6. Seems to me that clean air is certainly a thing of the past.

    Jiff
    http://www.privacy.mx.tc

  7. I highly doubt he has actually tried any of this. I work designing cement plants and anyone who has been around them knows the vast amount of work it would take to retro fit a cement plant to completely change the processes inside it. Experimenting with fuels and additives is one thing, getting a company to take a huge risk on producing potentially tons of useless product is a whole new game.

    Side note: Cement kilns actually keeps tons of garbage out of landfills as it will completely burn old tires, steel, plastic, oil and whatever else you decide to throw in there with the main emission as co2. A lot of the other stuff actually goes into the cement.

  8. This is important, and just shows that if we’re going to make a difference we need to concentrate on un-sexy stuff like cement, and not just on sexy stuff like electric race cars

  9. [...] Fuente: Clean Technica [...]

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