Why cement emissions matter for climate change (2018)
carbonbrief.org
carbonbrief.org
Cement is but one example of industrial processes that inherently release large amounts of CO2 even if we were to go 100% renewable energy-wise. Applying carbon-capture technology to cement plants would be a way to actually bring their emissions down to zero regardless. Capturing CO2 directly from such CO2-intensive processes would certainly give way more bang for the buck than trying to capture CO2 out of thin air, as many seems to be placing their hopes on these days.
And this is not theoretical. At least here in Norway, it is already being done at one cement plant: https://www.norcem.no/en/CCS
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Universi... Quite the concrete jungle...
Making Lime CaCO3 (+ heat) → CaO + CO2
Making concrete CaO + CO2 (in water, from air) → CaCO3
[there are lots of other things in concrete, but the CaO/CaCO3 are the media that glue them together into the useful composite they are]
They quote that as "half" the emissions, well those emissions are all reabsorbed by the product itself. The complete reabsorption does have a long tail, but if you expose CaO to air it will absorb CO2 all by itself.
The rest can be pretty trivially converted to renewable sources so it seems like this is just a big pile of scaremongering nonsense.
Which is unfortunate, it is difficult being scientifically literate and progressive being surrounded by people "on your side" who are spouting the exact same kind of nonsense and lies as your opposition.
coal need to end within a decade. oil needs to be cut in half within a decade. anything else is a distraction.
The world is running out of any fossil fuel except natural gas which can be extracted more cheaply than the various types of renewables.
With $100 USD/bbl oil you don't need protests and activism to switch away from fossil fuels, simple economics will drive energy choices. Saudi Arabia is going to run out, and it is likely they have been exaggerating their reserves and production capacity for political reasons. It won't take much to explode the price of oil and people know it and are planning for it.
That seems to be sort-of true, but mostly in the sense that renewables are getting cheaper. Fossil fuels don't seem to be getting that much more expensive. Mostly because the long run supply is actually fairly elastic.
There is a lot of oil around to be extracted, it won't "run out" but it is absolutely not elastic, and not at arbitrary prices. The big reserves which remain are considerably more expensive to extract and convert to a usable state. The $100/bbl rate is somewhere around the floor price for the oil economy when those resources dominate. The price of fossil fuels has bounced around in the last decade or two for political reasons. OPEC was forcing prices above $100 because they're a cartel but then North America found an enormous quantity of tar sands and similar kinds of expensive-to-extract but in huge quantities, it was profitable to extract at those prices and OPECs cartel price highs were broken because they could not afford to cut production in order to raise prices (much of OPEC proping up their power with money that they couldn't do without).
OPEC is running out of cheap oil, the world is running out of cheap oil. There is an enormous amount of oil left in the ground which can be extracted, but at a price. A price which is easily beatable by renewables now and definitely in the future when scaling and technology factors further lower their prices.
Fossil fuels are over, it's done. There's little left to protest or try to change, the situation is forcing it and it can be seen by anybody in the energy business. If you want to burn public money you can accelerate the process a bit with taxes and tech development (this is already being done and it could be done a bit more) but ultimately the future doesn't depend on that, just a bit of timing.
I do agree that the Saudi Arabian numbers deserve some doubt.
When I say that the supply of oil is elastic, I am talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply
Elastic in this context means that an increase in the price will bring forth more supply. That's very much the same thing as your statement that we are running out of cheap oil.
In the short run, oil supply and demand are very inelastic. That means that even if oil prices were to double for a week, it wouldn't much change the amount of oil consumed nor the amount of oil produced.
It takes a while to explore and exploit new oilfields, and it takes a while to shift consumption to and from oil. Thus in the longer run, say over a few years, oil supply and demand are much more elastic.
Especially if you add in new technologies, like we saw with fracking.
The longer run being more elastic than the shorter run means that the longer running price is more stable than in the shorter run. (Of course, more stable doesn't mean constant. We still see the secular rise in real oil prices.)
That's all still totally in line with everything you say.
Now you correctly mention that renewables are getting cheaper. For most applications, you just want power say for electricity generation, so you can easily substitute renewables (or coal..) for oil. That further contributes to long running stability of the oil price.
For some applications like fueling cars, or even more so: planes, carbohydrates are harder to replace. So they get substituted later, or perhaps never; depending on how effective relative prices (including taxes and reputational effects) move.
(In principle, we don't need fancy electric batteries: you can use electricity from renewables to synthesize aviation fuel from scratch. It mostly just carbon and hydrogen. It's not just worth it at the moment, and might never become worthwhile.)
I'm all in favour of replacing fossil fuels with renewables. My point is just that the market driven replacement comes mostly from renewables becoming cheaper, less so from fossil fuel becoming more expensive.
> If you want to burn public money you can accelerate the process a bit with taxes and tech development (this is already being done and it could be done a bit more) but ultimately the future doesn't depend on that, just a bit of timing.
Yes. Though I do wish we had a carbon tax, even if just a low one. Not just for any of the effects of steering people away from fossil fuels, but to show that combating climate change should be a money-spinner for the government, not a money sink. That should make it easier to argue against government efforts of trying to pick winners like the pretty much useless German photovoltaic subsidies of the past: Germany is not known for its long days of blasting sun..
(And about competitive effects in regards to other countries: just treat the carbon tax like VAT when you adjust for products and services crossing borders.)
Why wouldn't be want to tax the destruction of something instead of work/labour/selling stuff?
All the more so if the plastic objects are mostly buried alongside other plastic objects where they can be dug up and reprocessed later on as the need arises.
They are a huge problem for non-emissions reasons.
Also, if you live in a major western city, especially a non-coastal one, your garbage is pretty reliably ending up in a landfill. 90% of river-borne plastic pollution comes from just 10 rivers, all of which are in Asia and Africa: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
This is not a get-of-jail-free card to the rest of the world, but it does change the nature of our responsibility— in particular, it means that individual action is almost entirely worthless. Because the issue in the west is not the trash, it's that we're culturally exporting a single-use lifestyle that creates all that mess when it is imitated in places without the pipeline in place to manage the waste. So what is needed is a collective cultural change in order to alter what we export via our media, and the actions/expectations of our politicians, celebrities, tourists, etc.
https://www.cement.org/for-concrete-books-learning/concrete-...
Taking at a look at the link above (which is published by pretty much the more pro-cement group you can imagine), we get that carbon resorption is a thing, that certainly there is a potential for many structures to achieve carbon neutrality over their design lifespans, and that in the "best case", we're talking about 100% carbon neutrality over decades. We also get that 100% carbon resorption is not a design goal of many forms of current reinforced concrete applications since the presence CaC03 increases rebar corrosion.
Taken at face value then, what you have is that cement currently emits 8% of all human carbon activity, that over the timespan of decades, it may self sequester itself to 4%, but probably somewhere in between. So even if we trivially converted kiln sources to renewables, there's still probably a decent chunk of carbon emitted in cement creation process that may never be self-sequestered.
I think understanding what that final number comes out to would be pretty useful thing to understand, and is hardly scare-mongering.
I think once we drill into our heads that we need to decarbonize, after "the easy step" of cutting fossil fuel use, litterally every other form of decarbonization consists of chasing down some carbon source that accounts for the 2-5% range. There will be no low hanging fruit left.
It is also worth pointing out that the GP's comment was showing the chemistry for a lime-based concrete. OPC (Ordinary Portland Cement) based concrete is substantially different in terms of the chemistry and the amount of energy involved in the manufacturing process (due to the increased amount of energy involved in producing the clinker).
I think the ability of the biosphere to sink carbon is underestimated as are the benefits of a higher carbon atmosphere. Most talk about anthropogenic climate change are either denying it exists or exaggerating (usually without much knowledge) its negative side effects. Nobody talks about the benefits of expanding the arable land at higher latitudes or increased plant growths in forest (and forests denser and further north). At one point during a carbon spike the planet was more or less covered by jungle pole to pole, how's that for biodiversity? Change is hard and people are always upset about it, but this is a change we have already made for better or worse. There is much doom and gloom about any change and this one will have big consequences but we need to move past arguing about whether or not it will happen and towards how best to respond to it (and in ways other than only desperate attempts to reverse it completely). That doesn't mean there isn't a great benefit to capping the size of the change or to stop the forcing, but at some point you have to accept it and stop treating it as your doom.
For what its worth, I also wonder about that. I live in Canada, and I'm not aware of what steps are being taken to understand how we would have to respond to growing areas moving north. I've read that the areas where favourable climatic conditions are projected to settle in that we only have sufficient top soil for a few decades of intensive agriculture. I wonder what steps are being taken to deal with that.
I also would point out that people are upset that change is happening because they look at the form the change is projected to take, and most of the forms of change involve a lot of people either dying, or just having shitty shitty lives.
I mean, I get your point: It's hard to control complex systems, and unintended consequences can and do happen.
But we have a rather spectacular track record of powering through and figuring things out.
It will take an incredible amount of resources to control but there should be no doubt as to if, only when. The earth is our garden, we have only to put ourselves to the task to make it bloom. The blocking point is our intentions and efforts not the possibility. You can't be burning down the Amazon for a quick dollar and trying to maintain the climate at the same time. We're so focused on arguing about whether or not we're having an effect and panicking about what that will be that we're not really trying at all to gain any control.
True the climate is not a trained dog, it will not act on command, it is not a linear system that we can put one PID controller on and be done with it. It is complex, it has feedback system on top of feedback system, some negative, some positive, it's chaotic. None of that means we can't make it do what we want.
We just have to focus and not spend our time on the stupidity that drives our everyday political process.
By the way, on the topic of a changing climate and especially when climate at x changes to y, y changes to z, changes to etc; that is what some of my research is about in the context of agriculture.
Edit: Somewhat obviously, we also don't want to lose current biodiversity.
Meanwhile we have to say good-bye to New York, Shanghai, the Netherlands, and many other places that are close to the seas.
History is a circle...
> proposing to solve the crisis in their borders by expanding their "living space"
When you are in a crisis mode you don't have to time to wait for elections, the most likely result of social unrest is civil war. There are ample examples in very recent History.
Not to mention that "set up turrets on the southern border and mow them down" is not the most humane way to handle this, especially since the nations likely to fare OK(ish) are generally the ones that caused this trouble in the first place.
How about China and India, whose southern parts are densely populated, and who are capable of launching rockets to space, have nuclear weapons for a long time, etc?
You don't want them to feel desperate.
1) Keep building coal stations
2) Invade northerly regions that are now better for growing crops
Not just China and India. Russia could just about do this for the lolz when you consider they're already expansionist.
Mind you I'm not _endorsing_ this, I'm just worried about it.
In all seriousness if you really want to picture Russia as expansionist, the only time when this was really true was post-WW2 and Cold-war Era. Now Russia is far from being a fool enough to "invade" countries around much beyond their border. Let's not forget NATO as well. I'm not sure in what world this scenario would ever happen.
Also, it might be a good idea to bring evidence of this forward since immigrating seems to be getting harder as time goes on.
Then change to combat dress and take over.
How is that not an 'open border'? No need to bomb Rotterdam.
“And then the hard work begins...”
Optimizing the long tail is a slog. But when it’s most of the remainder it has to be done.
The longer we get to sort out the long tail the better. The more time we have the higher the chance of creating efficient CO2 scrubbers, then we can cut a lot of the tail off..
Tell me about it. I once talked to someone who says it's good that people are scaremongering on global warming because otherwise nothing might get done. They say there's no such thing as bad press, but I think it does science a disservice in the long term if perception is that it fails to deliver.
Portland cement, when hardened, does not absorb any significant amount of CO2. It does not form limestone. It mostly forms CSH [0] which just takes water, silicon dioxide, and quicklime. The last is sourced from limestone but does not turn back into limestone.
Perfect for algae production!
(Setting aside concrete carbonation, there are better materials to use for building construction. Concrete is a poor insulator, and sourcing other materials will reduce secondary and tertiary energy consumption. Also, buildings can generate energy, but not if they are made of concrete.)
I understand that you want to rationalize concrete use via carbonation, but consider the bigger picture. There is simply not a sustainable future in which we continue to build everything with concrete. Perhaps if decision-makers of yesteryear had considered these scientific properties (along with climate change), this could have been included in a comprehensive strategy to limit GHG emissions, but we are well beyond that point and must eliminate CO2 emissions now.
But yes, building has accelerated, so we are not in a steady state.
As an interesting aside, tossing lime into the oceans might help. Ignoring the energy costs, once inside the ocean the lime apparently binds twice as much carbon as was released when making it.
That process also helps against ocean acidification.
So in order for the whole thing to make carbon sense, you'd need to use stranded energy that wouldn't be used for anything else and doesn't release more carbon into the atmosphere, like solar power in a remote desert. And the balance gets even better, if you manage to capture the carbon release by the quicklime making process.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
Coverage of Nature letter in the popular press: Concrete products reabsorb nearly half CO2 released in cement manufacture https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-11-22/concrete-is-a...
Your other claim is, as others have pointed out, wrong. But also calling the renewable use in high energy industry "trivial" is quite a stretch. Here's a recent article on the issue that gives you an idea how challenging this is: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/10/10/209042...
https://axaxl.com/fast-fast-forward/articles/benefits-and-ri...
They mention fly ash as a resource but don’t cover anything other than that it will also become scarce.
Lime is a close second, but not as important when compared to the energy needs and chemical processes involved in clinker manufacturing.