Turning CO2 Into Building Materials: Mineral Carbonation International Tour
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- In today's video I visit Mineral Carbonation International's pilot plant facility. There are a really wide range of technologies that you can use to take captured CO2 and turn it into a useful product, carbon capture and utilisation or CCU. Often we hear about these kinds of technologies it's something really trendy like alcohol or diamonds. But in order to make any kind of dent in the amount of CO2 we will continue to emit once we've moved to 100% renewable electricity, and decarbonised transport, industrial processes and agriculture to the maximum extent possible, we're going to need to remove billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. And we do not need billions of tonnes of diamonds or cocktails!
A good CCU technology, needs to be three things. It needs to be economic, durable and scalable. Mineral carbonation is one of only a couple of CCU options in development where I really see the potential for a large scale a large amount of tons of CO2 that could be taken permanently out of the atmosphere. It's a natural process that normally removes CO2 from the atmosphere over millions of years. MCi has accelerated the process to minutes which transforms CO2 from a gas into solid materials that can be used in products like concrete and plasterboard.
So I was really excited to get the chance to visit MCi and then take a look in their pilot plant, get an explanation of how their product works and have a look at some of their pilot manufacturing facilities and hear about their plans for scale up into the future.
Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
01:07 What is Mineral Carbonation and MCi's technnology?
03:43 The raw materials and products of the Mineral Carbonation process
06:29 A tour of MCi's Pilot Plant Facility
09:39 MCi's future scale-up plan going forward
11:11 Rosie's thoughts on Mineral Carbonation
13:03 Outro
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Sources:
www.mineralcarbonation.com/
MCi on CZcams: / @mcicarbon - Věda a technologie
My company produce a Mineral based paint with a Graphene binder called Graphenstone, which utilises this process to absorb CO2 while curing on the wall. The average house painted with this paint would absorb a similar amount of CO2 as a large mature tree would in a year.
can you share the link for more information?
@@alvarohernandezmaker9624 Yes look up Graphenstone online. We make it in Australia, but it is also made in Spain.
To be a bit off topic it looks like congrats are in order. Go girl wishing you the best!
Thanks! Due today actually but could be any time in the next couple of weeks.
@@EngineeringwithRosie ❣ Congratulations, thanks for showing hope for the future.
The most comprehensive CCS process that I have seen, which actually makes sense. Good luck to the MCI team for their plans
So it can be set up at a steel refinery and combine the steel slag with concentrated CO2 from the chimneys to make CaCO3?
Making useful products from waste is what we need! :)
Methods like this one is stuff that I genuinely believe in can help alleviate the climate crisis. The process doesn't rely on wishy washy "solutions" to work, instead it just works already. And it's a process we can really scale up to a level wherein it will make a genuinely massive impact on the climate situation, whereas many "solutions" just don't on paper at all, or are really hard to scale.
Have you looked through a telescope recently? Climate change happens to other planets. What's the word on the reason for the changes there? Not the Sun right, the only thing we have in common? Aliens emitting too much CO2, the sneaky bastards? Ask a geologist. No such thing as stable climate, ever. It's an illusion, used to make you think something unnatural is happening. In school I was taught about the ice ages. Were you told the last one that ended with a comet shower somehow has to be the last? It made seas levels rise to present levels, 120m + higher than before, creating the continents. And yes, humanity was a real thing by then. Somehow we need to have a stable climate after a celestial and cataclysmic event?
@@Cloxxki The issue isn't that climate change is bad, in the sense that humanity cannot survive in a different climate. The issue is that the entirety of our infrastructure, our nations, our society, our food production and so many other aspects, heavily rely on the climate being similar and predictable.
Slow climate change of potentially even several degress C wouldn't be a problem, if only they happen over a sufficiently long timescale, the issue of today is that climate change might happen so fast, and with such a magnitude that it could irrevocably collapse our society as a whole if it happens over the course of a few decades.
I don't see that a climate change over a long time scale produces a less destructive climate in the end, just that rich nations can more readily adapt to some of the changes but most populations will not be able to.
In short words, you think it's scalable
@@op4000exe nah, none of that is true. You need to go live in the woods for a while to learn how resilient humans can be.
I’m a chemist and physicist btw.
Thanks Rosie! Great subject, great video!
I worked at a lime quarry in Canada. Further processed into cement and the pulverizer and kilns are horrendously energy intensive.
thank you for talking about climate solutions instead of climate problems
Great intro to a new hopeful tech Rosie, thanks. Will be interesting to follow this company to see how they do scaling up.
I enjoyed this video. Pretty information dense, in clean tech, on a topic I'm not very familiar with. Plenty of details. Well done.
Will be interesting to see what sort of footprint a commercial scale plant will take, especially including the feedstock handling side - I suspect this will have limited applicability for certain industrial processes.
seems best suited for concrete production. can be produced capturing the co2 released when making the portland cement and then mixed in as the aggregate for the concrete end product.
Very interesting! Thank you for presenting this work.
Great video. This looks very promising 👌
I appreciate your comments regarding the time it takes to bring new carbon capture technologies on line and scaled up.
Did you get a sense what the limiting factors were? Capital, engineering at scale, other?
Great to see such an insight. Soon there will be industrial parks where co2 is captured, than mineralized and used in products. All in one industrial park. The energy comes from a biogas facility where manure is used or from food leftovers. Evry building got pv panals and a nearby wind park is attached too. Let’s go!!!!
Interesting topic. Any idea how energy intensive the process is?
Another excellent and interesting video thanks! :) Very heartening to see great ideas like this being seriously worked on - hope it will help promote the investment and political attention that it urgently needs!
And the CaCO2 can be used in many industrial products, like paintings, coatings and plastics
Go MCi...Thanks Rosie...a little ray of sunshine.
buddy~Thnks- that's breathtaking picture,
Great Aussie innovation. Many thanks.From Ireland
If this is going to be as efficient as possible it nee to be powered by fossile free sources.
Trees are a very got at capture carbon. Wood (trees) is an excellent building material, both for small houses for one family and big buildings including several stories/floors high.
That was very interesting. Thank you. Actually i am amazed by the mci technology.
This actually demonstrates the "three step" green concrete where production sequesters carbon, the usage avoids carbon emission (normal concrete is a co2 emitter) and the concrete technically has lower carbon content than normal concrete because that's all that's needed for structural soundness but has the added benefit that the concrete will absorb co2 in it's product lifetime. If we compare this to say timber framed high rises the problem here is it on paper would be cheaper wood isn't really renewable without a lot of management and if we scale up it's usage it'll no longer be renewable.
Wood, the natural product, isn't renewable. That's a new level of psychosis.
That is a very interesting video and gives hope for the future!
Thank you.
I work at an art school and we generate a fair amount of casting plaster waste.. and I often wonder if it could be used to capture CO2.. it is presumably Calcium of some sort.. I thought it may be a fun project to do with students if anyone knows whether it is possible.. also it seems hard to get recycled. People are happy to take plaster board but not old moulds.. maybe harder to grind up?
you can't use casting plaster to capture CO2. It contains Sulphate. If you could replace the sulphate with carbonate you woul produce sulphur dioxide as a poisonous byproduct. That's why they use minerals that contain oxide and no carbonate and no sulphate so that the oxide can capture the CO2 and becomes carbonate.
@@idjles thanks for that info! Very useful
Love from Copenhagen. Greenland and parts of Arabia are rich in minerals that can 'catch' co2,..... Indeed, there's a strong case for 'reverse engineering'. Going from co2 via heat and back to,...... well usable materials..... Looks like what there guys are doing can be integrated with,... (don't get me started.)
A perpetual CO2 motion machine! Brilliant, I bet its lucrative as well, hats off to you sir!
Rosie, have long been a fan of Australia's engineering talent- from some of your "older heads" with mining backgrounds to the newer generations looking more and more like you! I do have a question about MCI's process; it uses water at one step to create a slurry, and after the mixing, the slurry is "filtered" for solids to be processed. All good, but how economical is it in terms of water use/reuse or wastage? I'm assuming the water let would be unfit for human consumption, though I could be wrong. BTW, I have come to expect unexpected turns from you lot; when Boeing was shopping for some international partners to build the tail sections of the 787, I believe, it was Aussie engineers who both figured out how and hos to make carbon fiber manufacture cheaper than they could make the parts in the US plus the shipping! That is the out of the box you keep doing- and we need all of it you can stand! FR
Hi Frederick, I’m not sure of the exact process that is used to separate the end product from the water 💦. However, I’d imagine it was a closed loop system. Where the water used is filtered, cleaned and then put straight back into the next batch of slurry. I’m sure there are plenty of hurdles, however if I was an engineer on this project, that would be my design criteria. Especially given the water scarcity in Australia
@@rmar127 that was much the driver of my question- in the larger sense, one of the things oil frackers have really tuned perception of wastage by industrial process- Australia's sometimes more sparse rains would make it more imperative. Thanks for the response. FR
Rosie - along with this and other promising technics I would be interested how to get / gain / harvest huge amounts of CO2 for those productions.
15% of CO2 in that process seems a lot; it was not mentioned how much CO2 they will need throughout their scheduled runup. Also: What quality of CO2 do they need?
Thanks for this Rosie. I currently pay a little to support ClimeWorks as I feel Carbon Mineraliation is one of the best systems to remove carbon from our environment. It's good to see someone approaching this in a different model.
Would this process work with desulphurogypsum as feedstock? That is to say, gypsum that has already seen service in flue stacks removing sulphur from the waste gases \m/
Good stuff, you lot. Until I get my tonne size diamonds, this is a great way to mitigate a host of challenges.
Cool job of blurring out the Siemens sign! Are they shy about their involvement?
Oh, no there were no instructions about the Siemens sign. My editor must have done it without me noticing 😊
Steelmaking slag starts out as calcium carbonate and the CO2 is driven off the material in the blast furnace, picking up silicates from the iron ore. This carbonation process would then be capturing only a part of the very CO2 the process produced- a minor mitigation at best, relative to using a method like the direct reduction of iron ore using hydrogen or perhaps one day, Boston Metals' melt electrolysis steel production method. As to serpentine and other natural Ca/Mg silicates, no mention is made of how much energy is needed to mine, transport, grind and "thermally process" the native materials so that instead of them gradually "weathering" to carbonates on their own, they do it quickly enough for these guys to get paid a credit for.
What will be the price/ton co2 removed once its scaled
This looks much better than the amoeba based co2 digesters, that I was looking into previously.
excellent !! OK, bye.
I heard "serpentinite" and had to do a double take. Isn't that the mineral that we get chrysotile asbestos from? I'm assuming there are other types that do not have asbestos content.
Actually I beleave that intergal to the sirpentinite
15% CO2 sounds quite high. How does that compare with regular flue gasses? It seems some concentration would be required.
Also how much energy is used in this process?
How does their cement compare to the normal stuff
I would like to see the flame resistance of the calcium carbonate ( plyboard replacement ) to see if it is better than standard.
Calcium carbonate does not ignite. Even if the fire were hot enough to start breaking the chemical bonds, the resultant CO2 produced would actually act to retard the flames. This is very unlikely though, given that the melting point of CaCO3 is 1339°C, so the fire would have to be insanely hot to break the chemical bonds.
@@rmar127 I used the term " Flame Resistance " not " Flammability " as some " Flame Resistant " materials actually reflect the heat and can help other items to combust. An example is Ceramic as inside Kilns. your kiln will not burn, it will reflect the heat so things inside burn. Sodium Bicarbonate also is flame resistant, you do not see Baking Soda Bricks in a kiln as it does not reflect heat.
Limestone (caco3) + energy release co2 to produce cao in order to capture co2..
What is the point here? Am i missing something???
So steel mills have source material, are a big producer of CO2, and have plenty of excess heat. Seems like it should be engineered directly into the steel making infrastructure.
Maybe good to contact saltx Technology Sweden: they can produce carbon free lime and cement where normally 1 ton of CO2 is released per Ton of produced material.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is interesting engineering solution. Compare that to incorporating carbon into the agriculture system where crops increase productivity with carbon with natural cycles of sun and rain. Culturally we would have to increase the value placed on appropriate farming techniques like regenerative agriculture that builds soil instead of depleting it.
Regenerative agriculture is very much needed. To regenerate fields everywhere. A good case for integrating climate concern, i.e. co2 and methane emissions, with other pressing problems.
Carbon nayyyyysh
Another interesting video, good job. I just didn't like the picture jumping all the time.
Great to see plausible processes like this. Ocean acidification is caused by CO2 and adding crushed magnesium silicate minerals directly to the ocean is a rather simple and direct method to take CO2 out of the environment and to save corals.
Mineral carbonarion has been going on for millions of years and that is one of the reasons CO2 in the atomsphere has been dropping from over 7000 ppm to as low as 180 ppm at the end of the last ice age. Sedimentation of dead marine life also has contributed. We were approaching times of CO2 famine before humans started to restore CO2 levels to where it originally came from, namely the atmosphere. Plants die around 150 ppm CO2.
Unfortunately most flue gasses have CO2 concentrations lower than 15%..... So there are immediate contradictions here - is it optimum for direct capture from flue gas or does it work best at >15% concentration? If the latter then I would like to see the technology that works best for concentrations in the 4-13% region
The flue gases would be concentrated
@@richardhill4938 How? Link to useful website please.
A 90% carbon capture rate if powered by dirty coal and carbon negative when powered by renewable energy is very promising. If the concrete that is made with the output from this process has any residual non bonded calcium, it will continue to pull CO2 from the atmosphere and get stronger just as Roman concrete has done for millennia.
I hope it can work at extra large scale because of the quantity we are emitting: "we now emit over 34 billion tonnes each year."
2:40 Thermal activation to improve reactivity of the mineral, sounds like heating calcium carbonate to turn it into calcium oxide. Guess what the by product is of that process? Carbon dioxide. So removing co2 just to replace it again. If this is true this removes nothing. This heat would also have to be from 100% renewable energy as well obviously. He did not mention this part of the process in his later detailed description with the props and it was not part of the plant either. So why was it in his poster?
I assume Newcastle U is a well-respected one, so I am prepared to be proven wrong, this is just a follow up question that Rosie has missed. She is not a chemist after all, but then neither am I. I really hope Rosie gets an answer to this, as otherwise this seems like very promising tech.
As a side comment: I find very amusing one argument about mining jobs in Australia is a comparison between miners and baristas--because Australia has more baristas than miners and, except for the mine company owners and investors, have more effect on the Australian economy. :)
Wow.. a carbon capture that works
If it works well enough, we'll ALL joint he famine gang soon enough. It's limited to poor countries now but food prices are rising. This will help A LOT to bring it to all of us until only to thought leaders on the left can afford to feed themselves. Glory!
Why is this not all over the world at every plant that runs fossil fuels to keep things running at the moment? This should be our Mediation Faze to bridge the time between now and when we transfer to something else it will at least help lower the % of atmospheric green house gas emissions through the transition period which is a time that could take a lot of time so might as well improve the situation the best way we can. This seems like a great option.
It is much easier to not put CO2 into the air, currently 30billion/tons/year, than to try and remove it in the future. We must exponentially grow renewable energy now.
I work for a company in Switzerland and we do pretty much exactly the same thing.
Now if you use the mineralized product and heat it over 550°C the CO2 gets released. So it doesn't make sense in any processes where it would be exposed lots of heat.
Would be nice to define and make objective the meaning of the word "economically viable".
Is there a universal accepted monetary value for carbon-capture as of 2022? Any CO2-capture (except perhaps horticulture) pays the "penalty" or "cost" for capturing CO2 in terms of energy or raw-materials (minerals mined specifically to capture CO2 or pumps to send the CO2-rich flue gases towards such minerals.
A universal monetary value would IMO level the playing-field for potential entrepreneurs looking at carbon-capture options, and shall provide a universal framework on "how to count" this achievement. (for example: If I mass-farm acacia, harvest it, and bury it deep underground, does this count as carbon-capture? How many kg of harvested (wet) acacia is equivalent to 1kg CO2? Do we count CO2 or just the "C" within the CO2?)
Millions of tonnes is on the scale needed to abate all Australia's emissions. I wonder what this will cost per tonne abated.
Trees take co2 from the atmosphere and grow into building materials
This is one idea that actually seems to be a solution to CO2 levels. Let’s hope it does actually become a viable product .
It might be a solution, but is it even a problem to go from 3 to 4 per 10.000 particles? Funded scientist tell us. But they also told us smoking was great for the arteries. They told us the Earth was flat and had Galilei killed for dissent.
The list goes on.
CO2 is plant food. Grow more trees. Build more farms. There is ACTUAL famine in humanity, food prices are skyrocketing. It's such a 1st world delusion to worry about too much CO2. Climate was never stable anywhere, not even on neighbouring planets right now. It's an illusion. The Sun is not stable, no planet can be stable. Celestial impacts ended the dinosaurs and super recently geologically, nearly ended humanity and 50% of the megamammals. "Science" what the fearful make it out to be. All hail the "Scientist". Hail...
Brucite is a perfect mineral for this see CO2Lock Corporation for details
It may be OK using CO2 in this process, and simulated flue gasses but real flue gasses are going to contain chemicals other than carbon which may react with the magnesium or calcium and produce undesirable end products.
If they can take 15% CO2 feedstock I hope they can pair themselves only with biogenic feedstocks and not with fossil fuels.
Let’s hope.
Rosie, love your videos. If / when you can, upgrade your video editing, as the present one, when it removes gaps. It has an annoying jump. Perhaps better just leave it as is comes
What happens when CO2 levels drop to 180 PPM - Forests and all life on land suffer (die) and the only life left is in the oceans and polar glaciers march to the equator.
CO2 emissions are 35 billion t a year globaly and they hope to have 1million t in 15 years? Did I miss some thing?
Jade? You could make jade with this process? Serpentine rock is low quality jade. Jade is work a packet. Literally green bricks! If you can get it to look like the stuff found in nature? Simply put Millions per tonne, It can pay for itself! It also great construction materials. Not sure if you would see a jade skyscraper? But concrete is definitely a good route to go. Current jade price $25,000 - 5,000,000 per kilogram USD. higher depending the source material? While many are messing about crypto mining? This would be a better way to do things! Just depends on the nephrite produced? It the same group as asbestos if I recall? So great care must be taken in production process to reduce the risk of asbestos formation. No point marketing a tech only to find out it hazardous to health. When Iceland start pumping this into volcanic rocks? I knew it was cause for building materials. Where does new rock come from? Land, sea and air of course! Stone masons humour, but there we go!
Call me when they reach the billion tons per day mark
This is a brilliant example of green engineering. Can the evaporator water be captured and drinkable? I would favour the calcium process as magnesium is more useful to other applications. Would acid rain breakdown the building material and release the CO2? I would keep the small scale system and just build more and locate them where required. I'm currently building an electronics off grid on a 22ft river cruiser which is also my home. Solar is the key to efficiency and I would love to build your electronics and sensors when required. Great work. :)
While our politicians have been working hard to give Australia a bad name, some STEM Aussies are making us proud. Maybe as well as women quotas for parliament we need STEM quotas as well. Rosie for PM!
Hi Rosie, I tried contacting you via your website contact form. Cheers Barry
I like how they never mention /all/ the facts, theres just one part of the process absorbing co2, but all the othe 8/9 parts generate co2 (unless running of renewables, and lets not go there...) and dont forget the footprint to transport raw materials, its great that you can absorb 10globby bits of co2 and stick that in advertising but its not totally honest if you dont mention that you created 8 to absorb the 10.... I'd like full figures please...
He said it's around 90 percent efficient. I took this to mean that for every 100kg of carbon it removes from the atmosphere, there is an energy cost of 10kg of carbon going up into the atmosphere. And he did 'go there' in respect of renewables: he said the efficiency figure would improve if the process was using a low-carbon energy source. I think he was talking about the entire end-to-end process.
Rosie, are you/MCI aware of Elon Musks prize offer of $100,000,000 for carbon capture? Would be cool to know what Elon thinks. I'm sure they wouldn't mind some investment.
The problem here is that you have to mine materials on top of the fossil fuel extraction. Its a variable cost (financially, energy and environmentally) proportionally to the amount of fossil fuel extracted.
Who cares, we are greenwashing HARD here, we cannot have critical thought now, we are saving the planet from overpopulation, bruh! Let's extract all the CO2 we have, place it where no-one can ever reach it and farm will lose yields faster than we can make our kids become trans to prevent offspring.
Just listen to the "scientists" they have never been wrong about ANYTHING. No, don't look that up.
Entropy always has the last laugh. HAve you done an energy balance for the whole process, including transportation, mining, etc re. use of fuel and generation of CO2? I think you are implying a perpetual machine here, by obscuring the real and holistic aspect of the processes described. CO2 is a thermodynamic 'sink' (energetically essentially the bottom for carbon). In order to transform it you have to 'pump' energy into the process, thus thermodynamic losses due to heat, sound, etc (entropy). Real mass and energy please? Thanks!
High school chemistry made useful.
If we say anything more it might seem bitter and resentful about the profiteering mass murdering b...s and their enabling friends who don't even pay taxes enough to repay the damage done, etc etc.
I learned in high school that ice ages come and go. I wasn't told they were over. Were you told?
Did you learn in high school when in time, where on earth, Climate was stable?
Can you name any planet with an atmoshpere that has a stable climate right now?
THAT is primary school logic and all the people like Rosie and her followers lack it.
Hey Rosi, quick feedback for the start. Its ok if the recording is imperfect, but the constant cuts in the middle of the sentence are really annoying.
EDIT: I'm not 5 minutes in and struggling to finish this video. I really like watching your content for it is always informative. So I really hope you'll stop doing that for the future. It breaks the flow of speech and feels extremely unnatural. When you have a slow speaker like someone presenting something, you as a viewer can speed up the video. Speeding up this video just makes the interviewee seem really annoyingly talk nineteen to the dozen. I also doesn't help the video. Its similar to watching a stream with bad internet and constantly dropping frames.
Rosie was probably working to cut out the constant filler words and repeats.
Things like 'um', 'ah', 'urm', 'so so', 'it it' etc.
I treated the video like a podcast, and listening to it in the background. That worked well for me.
It was fine with me as well Rosie! Great video, I'm a big fan although you might not get as much time to make new ones!
When you make edits that literally overlap every fifth word, you make your video unwatchable.
What a waste of energy. Hey, what's the ideal CO2 level / temperature for earth? How many poor people have to die because environmentalists are making energy scarce and expensive?
Hi go back to school. You need to do some learning.