Yes We Can! Long Island 2012Many environmental organizations and Long Islanders say that there is no such thing as clean coal, that clean coal is an oxymoron. These groups demand that coal be rapidly phased out and replaced by clean technologies. On the other hand most proposed federal legislation includes research and development dollars for carbon sequestration for coal burning power plants. Why? In my opinion such legislation merely acknowledges that coal is here to stay for the foreseeable future because it’s so cheap and it forms the backbone of the economy in many states. So I say let’s embrace this legislative concept and turn loose American ingenuity to find solutions to improve coal technology. Yes We Can!
One company that is taking that challenge seriously is Calera. Calera has developed a technology that will sequester the carbon from power plant emissions and use it to make green cement. The process has been in testing mode for a couple of years and a full scale pilot will start this year. Will it work? I can’t say. The challenges are significant, especially scaling up the process to handle the enormous quantities of carbon that must be processed and the even larger quantities of sea water (or other saline solutions) that must be pumped to make the process work. IF it works it sounds much more stable than other alternatives such as injecting carbon into the ground, creating huge underground reservoirs of carbon rich gases that some fear could escape in the future or cause unforeseen side effects.
Cement is a major component of concrete, the world’s most widely used man-made material, an integral part of roads, bridges and buildings. But making cement requires heating limestone and other materials to very high temperatures, a process that releases into the atmosphere large amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, a leading cause of global warming.
Brent Constantz is working to fix that problem with an environmentally-friendly cement that actually captures CO2 and locks it away.
At his California company, Calera, scientists mix air and water to create the cement powder and aggregate pebbles that are the basic ingredients of concrete. But while traditional cement, called Portland cement, adds CO2 to the atmosphere, Calera’s green cement takes the greenhouse gas out of the air – a lot of it. For every unit of carbon that Portland cement adds to the air, Brent Constantz says his green cement removes three units.
To read the rest of the article see Voice of America.
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