Slashdot Mirror
Australian University Unveils New Carbon-Trapping Bricks
FirephoxRising writes "A research pilot plant in Newcastle will trial world-first technology that turns carbon emissions into bricks and pavers for the construction industry. More efficient and stable than storing gas in the ground, the new method will sequester carbon and can work anywhere, unlike geo-sequestration which is site specific."
From TFA: "capture carbon dioxide emissions and turn them into rock." We all know what rock is made from carbon...
So they're bringing coal to Newcastle -- specifically, artificial coal bricks and pavers!
Will this be yet another energy-intensive scheme with high costs?
Can't see any problem with carbon based bricks. They'll burn nicely.
The article fails to mention what they intend to convert the CO2 into, or how much it will cost. Maybe the primary function of the company is to win government grants.
CO2 is carbon at its maximum oxydation level (you cannot burn it anymore). Limestone is made of calcium carbonate (and magnesium carbonate in a lesser extent), it is also carbon at its maximum oxydation level. The transformation seems smart, but it requires water (easy part) and calcium. Where will that calcium come from? The usual source is limestone...
Why not propane?
They could cart the CO2 and some water to a place with lots of wind or solar but inconvenient access to a hungry power grid and use the Fischer-Tropsch process to synthesize "carbon neutral" ish propane. When it burns, they could recapture the CO2 and do it again.
Construction with this product and our high housing cost will be a thing of the past. We would build our way to lower rents.
And clean the air.
A good question, though I'm less cynical about the presumed answer. They did say something like they were recreating the Earth's natural processes, so probably something like calcium carbonate (CaCO3), the stuff that egg and seashells are made of.
Can anybody say how various carbonates compares energetically to oil and CO2? My chemistry is pretty rusty. Since the final cycle would be oil -> CO2 -> carbonate the maximum net energy would be that from a hypothetical fossil fuel -> carbonate transition, which would tell us how energetically feasible this is with the right catalysts. If it's an endothermic reaction this is a complete non-starter except as part of some hypothetical future atmosphere-scrubber (and I do really hope we have the tech ready if it comes to that).
If the reaction is exothermic though then there's hope, especially if it's a significant portion of the (presumably larger) oil -> CO2 energetic gap. If we could complete the fossil fuel -> brick transition while generating even half as much power as currently then this could be a real game-changer. Every coal- or oil-fired power plant could have it's adjacent brick factory and become carbon neutral. We could stay on fossil fuels for centuries without aggravating the global climate, even as oil and gas run out - we have truly massive coal reserves to fall back on. Of course we'd need to really shift the attention back to general environmental protection again, and get serious about that, otherwise the search for fuel could get *really* ugly. Coal mining isn't exactly environmentally friendly
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Want to capture and sequester CO2 without all that hubbub and with existing machinery and technology? Plant fast growing pines and forests, cut them down and build houses with them. Wait... we're already doing that. That's CO2 that is sequestered in a building for decades or more. How many tons of wood does a house use? I think figuring out how to properly dispose of bulldozed homes would be a better effort. Such as converting the wood to char and spreading that out on our farmlands where it will remain as char for centuries.
How are they turning it into a solid? What are the byproducts of the process? And how harmful are they compared to the CO2?
for the construction industry...
Are they cheap? It's hard to beat concrete for price.
Are they black? black won't sell. nobody wants black bricks.
Are they flammable? The only compressed carbon i know offhand is coal. Nobody will want flammable bricks.
Solve those three potential problems and you might have something. And if they do you might want to forget about bricks and pavers and replace the cement block with them. That would sell. Billions of them.
Your proposal to add massive amounts of cellulose and lignin to the environment is relevant to my interests...
That'll work out well with the acid rain around here...
#DeleteChrome
Carbon will burn quite nicely. I can imagine a street paved with these going up like a torch when someone uses a road flare. IDIOTS!!!
These bricks are painted gold. Of course they're shooting for a metaphor there, but I also suspect that they're doing this because the bricks are chemically fragile -- they break down when they get wet for example?
There are apparently 2 Australian companies that trap C02 as a brick/solid form.
One being Timbercrete, which takes sawdust and combines it with a variety of things to produce "bricks":
http://www.timbercrete.com.au/pdfs/Timbercrete%20an%20Introduction%205_0%20WEB.pdf
The 2nd, being the one that is referenced in this Slashdot post is similar to the techniques used by some of the geothermal power plants where the CO2 bearing waste heat/steam is pumped into Basalt caverns where the acidic mixture results in some carbonate/limestone. In their case, looks like they intend to kick off mining for serpentinite(or another cheap alkaline mineral), crush it into a fine powder, and then react it with heat, pressure, water, and CO2 to produce a variety of carbonates or other stable carbon bearing minerals.
I have a patent pending system that captures carbon from the atmosphere and turns it into wood, for the construction industry. The process only requires water and sunlight, while maintenance costs are minimal.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Perhaps they should bring them to Canberra. With the amount of CH4 emissions released there, especially now during election time ...
Really ... so we stuff CO2 in the ground, under the sea, in bricks, whatever; how long before it comes back? It's not like it will disappear, it will still be there. So will it pop back up when the buildings bricked with the stuff are demolished? Will the CO2 get re-released from the earth/sea in one, two, or X years? Isn't the whole carbon capture just a way of deferring consequences, passing them off to some future generation?
Sooner of later, regardless of what we do, we will have to grapple with the reality that is our planet. Our species' greatest asset is that it can adapt, NOT change/control/bend-the-planet-to-our-will but _adapt_.
Planet's getting warmer? Suck it up, buttercup. Things change.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
back in the air.
To slow down the new glaciation event.
Warm > Cold.
The article says they have spent 6 years researching the technology. 6 years ago is also when German researchers published their discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_carbonization (The German version of the Wikipedia article is much more informative.)
As far as I know, it started with a researcher wondering how exactly the Earth produced coal and oil and discovering that for almost a century nobody had done any new experiments. So he did some, adding some of today's knowledge.
It turns out that if you put water and basically arbitrary organic waste (wood, grass cuttings, leaves, entire weeds, whatever) into a pressure cooker, add some citric acid as a catalyser and then heat it to 200 degrees Celsius, then you get an exothermic reaction which makes the stuff keep that temperature without further input of energy. Provided you are not using an ordinary pressure cooker (which will explode) but some special thingy.
You stop the reaction after 8-12 hours and filtrate the water to get the product. Depending on the precise time you stop, you can create topsoil, oil, brown coal or low-quality stone coal. While the method doesn't seem to produce any excess heat, you can theoretically make an industrialised country CO2 neutral by treating all of its green waste that way and storing the resulting low-quality coal underground, e.g. in an old coal mine.
you're telling me that it's news that some company found a way to turn CO2 into a building material. Nature has been doing this for millennia. They're called "trees."
I mean this is the only real issue with today's use of hydrocarbons, we have not closed the cycle.
Hydrocarbons about one the best forms of energy we have, which is why it is so popular. Its easy to transport, inexpensive to distribute. Consider the impact battery production has on the environment and the fact they pale in comparison to the amount of energy they can store compared to an equivalent volume of hydrocarbons.
The problem is that we have taking carbon reserves from millions of years of oil and natural gas production and have released it in just over a century.
All the components to make hydrocarbons are in the air, and plants use it through photosynthesis to create what can be turned into biofuel. The problem is I don't see us planting enough crops around the world to offset the release of hydrocarbons we use, and also not enough to remove excess CO2 from the air.
So I would support projects that actually take CO2 out of the air and turn it back into fuel. Imagine a closed cycle where humans reach equilibrium by only releasing as much CO2 as can be trapped back and made back into fuel. No more oil crisis and if done right, no more global warming issues.
I guess bricks or building materials are fine in the short term, but we need energy more than we need building materials.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
As one of the least talked-about emitters of CO2 is Portland Cement.