Cement manufacturing is one of the worst offenders in CO2 production, accounting for perhaps 5% of world wide CO2 output.

Los Gatos based Calera is making progress on a new process to neutralize cement CO2. Interestingly, Calera's process bears some similarity to the efforts to Carbon Sciences to sequester carbon in calcium carbonates. Calera founder Brendt Constantz recently expressed interest in possibly expanding using the old closed plant in Davenport should it go up for sale. Currently Calera operates in Moss Landing.

The Mercury profiles Calera and better known Serious Materials and Tesla.

Calera was founded in 2007 to bring Constantz's brainstorm to market. While conventional cement production requires kilns that heat limestone to 1,400 degrees Celsius, Calera's process recycles power plant emissions, scrubbing the carbon dioxide with alkaline water to create a raw material for cement. The result, Constantz says, is a "negative carbon" product because it both cleanses power plant emissions and eliminates carbon dioxide in cement production.

At its demo operation beside Dynegy's natural gas-burning power plant at Moss Landing, Calera is fed by two old pipelines with seawater and a new pipeline from the power plant that redirects 10 percent of its flue gases. (The goal is to eventually use it all.) The chemical process, which Constantz says is akin to converting milk into powdered milk, produces cement powder. The byproduct of desalinated water is sold to the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency or returned to the ocean.

Calera also has pilot projects in Australia, using underground brine water, and in Dubai, using seawater. In those locales, Constantz said, the water byproduct is a much-coveted bonus. Calera has inked a partnership with Bechtel, the San Francisco-based construction giant, to bring the technology to global market. Power plant operators facing pressure to curb carbon emissions may do so by getting into the cement business.

Rafael @www.ClimateAtBay.net

Nanotubes and carbon sequestration

Carbon sequestration is likely a required solution whose urgency is increasing by the day (especially given that folks like Energy Secretary Steven Chu are beginning to acknowledge that we will likely exceed 450 ppm carbon in the atmosphere - the point considered by many to be a breakpoint beyond which runaway warming is likely).

The problem is that most sequestration schemes pushed by the fossil fuel industry simply isn't credible - trying to control CO2 as a gas.

But there appears to be increasing momentum around converting CO2 into a solid - something which improves the prospects dramatically. The most recent entry is from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Here’s the deal: The most reliable way to store and secure CO2 is to get it to attach to a solid and form a carbonate. (Think coral covering rocks in the ocean.) That process is thermodynamically stable and also provides a long-term solution to holding onto CO2. The problem is that it takes a very long time for that to happen using current methods — as in, thousands of years.

But Lawrence Berkeley recently managed to produce nanoscale magnesium oxide crystals, which staff scientist Jeff Urban says could help speed up that CO2-solid bonding process. “Magnesium oxide crystals are known to influence processes and rates of reaction,” he said. “And if we can control the size and surface chemistry of the crystals, we may be able to dramatically increase the rate of CO2 being stuck to the surface.”

More on the story at Earth2Tech. Technical details at the source.

Santa Barbara based Carbon Sciences claims to have a scalable, non-energy intensive process to transform CO2 and water into carbon fuel or into solid calcium carbonate.

Of the fuel process they state:

Some of the known approaches for CO2 to fuel transformation include (1) direct photolysis which uses intense light energy to break off the oxygen atoms in CO2, and (2) chemically reacting carbon dioxide gas (CO2) with hydrogen gas (H2) to create methane or methanol. Both of these conventional engineering approaches require immense energy due to high pressure and high temperature chemical processes. For certain applications such as military and space, the high cost of these technologies may be justifiable. However, we do not believe these approaches will be economically viable in creating transportation fuels for global consumption.

By innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering, we have discovered a low energy and highly scalable process to transform large quantities of CO2 into gaseous and liquid fuels using organic biocatalysts. The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts, such as zinc, gold or zeolite, with traditional high energy catalytic chemical processes, our process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyze certain chemical reactions required to transform CO2 into basic hydrocarbon building blocks. Of greatest significance, our process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, thereby requiring far less energy than other approaches.

If truly scalable it could be significant, providing a (near) closed loop "fossil fuel". In theory we could burn coal for example and turn it into a vehicle fuel. The problem of course is that capturing CO2 from millions of mobile sources is very difficult but it could be an important transitional phase as a 2 for 1 carbon reduction. Alternately, the fuel could be burned by an electrical plant and from its CO2 new fuel is created for the same plant. And if the transformation is powered by renewable fuel (and vehicles are electric) this is extremely attractive.

Furthermore, Carbon Sciences claims to have a process which takes CO2 and other minerals as input and outputs calcium carbonate.

Like the first process, this is a devils in the details discussion but here too the potential benefits are considerable. With China building 2-31-2 coal plants a monthweek, it is urgent to find a means to sequester carbon. Most discussions have circled around injecting it in the ground or ocean. Injecting it deep underground as a gas will likely result in leakage, which is catastrophic even in small quantities. Injecting it in the ocean, even frozen has consequences not just with leakage but on ocean acidity - and in turn all life in the ocean. These are not credible options any time soon. But as a solid, sequestration- and even reuse - becomes credible.

Interestingly, just days ago I spoke with a former senior scientist for Toyota who was instrumental in the creation of the Prius now working on a CO2 to solid carbon sequestration process with a new firm called Full Circle. He claims the CO2 can be sequestered this way for 10,000 years. It seems more than one firm has their eye on that opportunity.

More on Carbon Sciences at TriplePundit.

The future is not coal. The US Department of Energy pulled the plug on what was supposed to be the leading edge "clean coal" project in the country, "FutureGen". "Clean coal" is an oxymoron - even if sequestration were implemented, it would likely leak.

Here in California it's sometimes easy to think that coal doesn't touch us but the reality is more complicated. Check out where your electricity comes from. Not only does California have a couple coal plants but it imports somewhere around 20% of its power. Determining the source of that is difficult.

The good news is that more and more proposed coal plants are being denied or withdrawn (even in Kansas). To see where coal plants have gone down in flames check out this Google map. Coal's prospects in the US are dimming but Big Coal presses on. And they have the gall to claim they are after "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a cooler planet."