There goes my dream of antimatter concrete. Thx, buddy for crushing dreams. Sidenote: they found some self-healing feature of the roman concrete recipe. I think it was limestone additive? It's a depletable deposite in the compund but can work significantly longer than modern concrete.
And all things concrete is heavily energy intensive.
Wellllllllllll, if you want to go kinda environmentally friendly. According to some documentary I saw as a kid the Chinese added rice to their mortar on parts of the great WALL (in Trump accent) and thats why it lasted so long. Maybe we can get very long lasting cement and concrete if we add rice.
Crushing dreams, rice is probably the most environmentally detrimental of the staple corps. Rice paddies produce Methane, said to be 4x more damanging to ozone layer than CO2.
Our only hope is if CIG takes over the industry. It's be 5x more cost effective without adding carbon emission.
Always right to be sceptical about R&D / POC stuff, for sure
Not my area, but I suspect paste there is referring to the cement itself (prior to use in the concrete). Going by the talk of compressive strengths achieved I doubt it's used just an exterior layer.
You're absolutely right that to be carbon-negative it would have counter-act the overall emissions of the other 70% of standard cement over its 30+ lifetime of sequestering. There's not enough info in the excerpts to be sure though.
(Given that
the high heat & chemical reactions required for standard cement production are the key driver of its C02 outputs, I'm assuming its lifetime limestone weathering emissions are of a lesser order. So it seems at minimum feasible to me in a 30yr timeframe. But would be good to see the full plan. Do they expect to be able to up the biochar ratio, etc?).
They're not the only game in town though. Lotta people looking at this slice of the C02 pie. (And a lotta potential if you can find an even vaguely competitive product that could get broad adoption.)
Here's another fun one
When it comes to CO2 stuff, I'm extra skeptical. I haven't seen anything that doesn't look half scammy yet.
From what I remember a standard test block is poured from a slury and set in around 4 weeks or 30 days. After that the increase in strengtch is minimal. Those blocks are relatively small in comparison to any structures built like a pillar or bridge section. I just wonder if the core in large structures actually benefit from any kind of increase in absorbtion at all.
When I read bio-charcoal (from organic waste) I immediately think black poopy dust.
Unrelated, I watched people burn charcoal once and they said they get around half to a third of the wood back in charcoal, the rest is burnt. Baking in oven is better and I made drawing charcoal that way once. Still has to wonder how much energy I'm putting in to get the final product.
Here's the real dream crushing thing. If we do use biowaste for bio-char and construction, wouldn't that take away from supply for agricultural fertilizer/animal feed use? Higher fertilizer cost, higher food cost, higher cement cost.
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