[bobfromhuddle]

I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card".

I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.

The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.

[chris_va]

Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.

You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.

[bobfromhuddle]

Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.

[fulafel]

Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?

[bobfromhuddle]

Not at any scale that counts. There are a whole bunch of companies _trying_ to make zero carbon cement, but it's all very early stuff.

The lifetime of a cement plant is 30-50 years, and they cost 100-200M Euros to build, so even if there were a process that was ready to scale today, producing a cement that passed regulatory standards, we'd still be making some Portland cement into the 2070s.

Ergo, producers would like to stick a carbon-capture plant onto their kilns.