Turning CO2 Into Building Materials: Mineral Carbonation International Tour

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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[timmonapier]

To be a bit off topic it looks like congrats are in order. Go girl wishing you the best!

[scottwilliams]

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.

[ahmedsiddique]

The most comprehensive CCS process that I have seen, which actually makes sense. Good luck to the MCI team for their plans

[scottatkinson]

A perpetual CO2 motion machine! Brilliant, I bet its lucrative as well, hats off to you sir!

[cristianacevedo]

thank you for talking about climate solutions instead of climate problems <3

[D_Rogers]

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! :)

[cflow]

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!!!!

[opexe]

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.

[beakhammer]

Great Aussie innovation. Many thanks.From Ireland

[fjalics]

I enjoyed this video. Pretty information dense, in clean tech, on a topic I'm not very familiar with. Plenty of details. Well done.

[johnway]

Great intro to a new hopeful tech Rosie, thanks. Will be interesting to follow this company to see how they do scaling up.

[RazorSkinned]

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.

[kirkwagner]

Interesting topic. Any idea how energy intensive the process is?

[IanKath]

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.

[Mediumdave]

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!

[helmutzollner]

Very interesting! Thank you for presenting this work.

[pauld]

Thanks Rosie! Great subject, great video!

[oootoob]

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.

[giansolomon]

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?

[iankynaston-richards]

Cool job of blurring out the Siemens sign! Are they shy about their involvement?