Richard Adamson, managing director at Carbon Management Canada, said the Albertan and Canadian governments supplied $50 million in funding two years ago, but it is uncertain whether similar amounts will be forthcoming.
As for Mercier, the scale-up of his project from less than 1 percent of the cement plant's gas to a commercial level will depend more on money than on technological success, he said.
"A lot will depend on how badly companies need magnesium carbonate," he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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8 Comments
Add CommentDoes the use of Magnesium Carbonate end up returning CO2 to the atmosphere?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSonoran: Yes, the uses that I'm aware of for magnesium carbonate in the steel industry (metallurgical flux) involve melting it as a component of slag, and would certainly result in re-releasing the CO2. And using it for pH control in water treatment would tend to release the CO2 as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs there any way that the captured CO2 could be used in punishment of spammers like Shirl03? Perhaps hard labor shovelling loads of magnesium carbonate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetter to avoid producing the CO2 in the first place. Nuclear Power can easily do that. Just have to muzzle and marginalize Big Carbon who will buy anyone & everyone to prevent that from happening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNope, entirely feasible. Would take some decades to achieve, of course, changing 85% of the World's energy supply & infrastructure cannot be done overnight. Where I live in the North, our heat was supposed to have been supplied through district heating and 10 MWth Slowpoke III reactors, at $1k per kwth, about 1/10th the cost of present Oil heat. The reactors were blockaded by widespread protests from paid-by-oil Greenie groups.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd Methanol/DME fuel can be made from Biomass/Waste/Volcanic-waste-atmospheric-industrial-agricultural CO2 plus Nuclear H2, Nuclear Electricity & Nuclear Process Heat. And Methanol feedstock can and is used to make synthetic diesel. Quite economical, cheaper than present Oil products, when scaled up.
So it can be done, but the Oiligarchy don't want that to happen. They would rather preserve the status quo and put up some Wind Turbines & Solar Panels to keep what they call "the useful idiots" happy.
It is still better to use carbon that has been captured instead of releasing additional carbon from original sources. This gives the choice of releasing 1 carbon atom twice or 2 carbon atoms once. Obviously releasing 1 is better than releasing 2. Scale that up to thousands of tons and it becomes a good thing. It is even better if it pays for itself as a "free" carbon reduction method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The firm Skyonic, for example, announced a deal earlier this year to capture carbon dioxide from a cement plant and turn the gas into baking soda, hydrocholoric acid and other products."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the biggest scam yet, and/or this author doesn't author doesn't know much about chemistry.
Just a thought from a severely un-knowledgeable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisearth inhabitant... are there any plants which
might serve, in the long term, to remove CO2
from the air/sea, by forming various carbonates
(say, of Ca, Mg, Fe, Al or ?)? This would be
in addition to their usual conversion of water
and CO2 into organic matter, which would simply
return that CO2 to the environment on very short
time scales. Such carbonates would, I think,
form a much more stable and less impactful
sequestration of CO2.
Might require some genetic tweaking though. We
are perhaps not that advanced yet. FWIW.