As concrete month draws nearer to a close, it’s time to look at an option not previously explored, continuing to use limestone but bolting on carbon capture and paying for waste disposal in permanent sequestration sites. After fifteen years of assessing carbon capture technologies, pilots and proposals, this is one of the few use cases where it might be economically viable compared to alternatives.
This uses the average for heavy industrial users in Europe of around 12 euro cents per kWh, not the rate of around 20 cents truck stops will pay to charge trucks, by the way. If you’re wondering why cement plants don’t use electricity and avoid the carbon dioxide, the table above should make it clear. It’s more expensive.
Real carbon pricing — and remember this is aligned with the EU’s budgetary guidance for business cases and the USA and Canada’s social cost of carbon — will triple the cost of a ton of cement made using coal for energy. We have our upper bound. My cost workups for fly ash and slag geopolymers suggest that the cost of the amount required to replace a ton of cement should be less, but third party assessments indicate that it’sas expensive. As it’s barely used in the industry, it’s safe to say that my estimated costs were off and that it’s at least 30% more expensive.
How much will capturing and sequestering that CO2 cost? Surprisingly little to capture, given electrified heat and less if Sublime’s electrochemical process is proven able to scale and were used against limestone, as it produces a stream of pure, cold CO2 at 10 atmospheres of pressure, the best possible case for capturing it.
Because of this mismatch of thousands of cement plants with the location of potential sequestration sites, pipelines for CO2 are required. This isn’t a technical concern. There are thousands of kilometers of CO2 pipelines in operation, albeit almost entirely in the USA for enhanced oil recovery. No, this is a liability concern related to concentrations of human beings.
And that second sentence is the kicker. Excluding liability concerns masks the real cost of CO2 transport. In my assessment, whenever a CO2 pipeline goes through a more than sparsely populated area, it will be required to be in gaseous form. What does that cost? In the range of $30 to $50 per ton, much higher. The population density map of Europe covers 19,000 kilometers, and probably 30% of it would be costed at that rate.
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