If we replaced all the rock now mined and substituted it with limestone aggregate created from CO2, over time we could reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere to a level comfortable for human habitation. The source of calcium for Blue Planet ranges from demolished concrete to the ocean. One can foresee a growing market for this concrete, especially as a component of buildings and streets in coastal cities facing sea level rise. Blue Planet’s business is growing rapidly, especially with new plants in Asia.

        Peter Fiekowsky, a guest speaker, discussed the process of making carbon-negative aggregates for concrete using the Blue Planet process. He showed several slides of a factory in Silicon Valley that produces limestone pellets using captured CO2 from a nearby natural gas power plant. The pellets are used as a substitute for traditional rock aggregates in concrete production, making the carbon footprint of the building material negative by sequestering CO2 almost forever.

        Chris Cheeseman, a participant in the discussion, highlighted the problem of Portland cement, which is a key binder in concrete. Its production emits large amounts of CO2 due to the high temperatures involved in heating the limestone as well as the resulting chemical reactions. Cheeseman stated that more Portland cement was produced last year than in the whole of history, and its production is associated with high carbon emissions. Cheeseman’s Seratech team in Britain is developing a supplementary cementitious material derived from magnesium silicate minerals, which react like cement to form the glue that sticks everything together in concrete. Magnesium silicates are widely distributed around the world and offer a more sustainable alternative to Portland cement. Cheeseman emphasized the importance of working with the cement industry to develop new materials that are compatible with existing infrastructure.

        The panelists compare the two different approaches to reducing carbon emissions in the production of concrete. The Blue Planet process produces synthetic limestone from industrial carbon dioxide emissions that can be used as a replacement for traditional concrete aggregate. The Seratech process, on the other hand, uses magnesium silicate to create a supplementary cementitious material that can be used with traditional cement, and the magnesium part can be carbonated using calcium ions from industrial processes. Both processes can reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the production of concrete. Seratech is not competing with Blue Planet but addressing a different part of the concrete production process.

        The conversation touches on the challenges of introducing new materials into the conservative construction industry and the importance of safety and long-term viability. Sometimes in UK people have introduced innovations in concrete with deleterious consequences that appeared only 15 or 20 years later. Fortunately, we know enough now what went wrong, and the same mistakes will not appear in the any concrete that we’re using now. So, we should be penalizing the industry more now for emitting CO2 to force them into decarbonizing fast enough.

        The Seratech team hopes to reach pilot plant scale within a year with the right funding. The discussion also touches on the need to find alternatives to traditional concrete aggregate, which is obtained through harmful quarrying practices. The potential of carbon-negative concrete to reduce carbon emissions and sequester carbon in new buildings is highlighted, and the panelists note the importance of government support and carbon pricing to incentivize industry to transition to low-carbon options.

        One advantage to the Blue Planet concrete is that its synthetic limestone is chemically identical to natural limestone, so safety is not an issue, but it lacks the variability of quarried limestone. And the Seratech material is identical to fly ash, so it also is not an innovation that would worry the existing industry. The main challenge lies in convincing governments and industries to adopt the carbon-negative concrete, which, like all other innovations in building materials, requires rigorous testing and demonstrating that it is strong and fit for purpose. Standard testing procedures have been established for testing concrete and are well accepted. There is also a need to work with standard writers to write new clauses and pages for codes of practice, as this is necessary to make the concrete 100% approved. Pilot projects are being planned, with funding being a key issue.

       The group acknowledges that it is not just a technological challenge, but also a public relations problem. The hardest thing in the world is to really make a difference for our children, and that is what we need to convince people of. In addition to getting industry interested, it is important to get people with chequebooks to write cheques. Gray hairs and the youth are important groups to persuade. The conversation ends with a suggestion to focus on the oil sands in Canada for a potential pilot project, given their reputation for not doing enough and their opportunities for capturing CO2.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript has been machine generated using “otter.ai.” Prior to using information from the transcript, please watch the video to catch any obvious errors.

Metta Spencer  00:00

Hi, I’m Metta Spencer. Today we’re going to talk about concrete, which may not thrill you, but I think it’s the most exciting topic I’ve talked about in ages. I’ts about how to refreeze the Arctic. Okay, so we have some experts with us today. And we have some people who are going to question the experts. So our format is a little different from the usual. And I will introduce you folks quickly, if I can do so, right here. I want to introduce you all and, and the three of you especially because you are folks who know something or other about carbon negative concrete, which I only know a little bit about, but I am very enthusiastic about. So in in London is Chris Cheesman. Wave at us, Chris. Chris is an expert on a new version or his version of carbon negative cement, I believe. And in London with him is his colleague, Mike Cook, a colleague who works on the same project. Therefore, he knows his way around a cement mixer now and then. And in California, is it someplace in Silicon Valley is that Los Gatos? So, Los Altos? Okay? Peter Fiekowsky has written a wonderful book that I recommend. I’m more excited about it than any book I’ve read in ages. There it is: Climate Restoration. Very good. Thanks so much, Peter. And Peter is going to be my expert on Blue Planet procedures for developing carbon negative concrete. Yeah, because we are going to have some real questions that I certainly can’t answer. And anyway, I’m delighted. That’s wonderful. Adele Buckley is here in Toronto and she has brought her family. Charles Buckley, who’s out in Alberta, I believe, and I’m sorry, I don’t know. Charles, his wife, who are you? Joan?  Hello, Charles and Joan. Welcome. And Evner Taran is here in Toronto. She’s on the editorial board of Peace Magazine,. And in Turin, Italy is Peter Wadhams, who is my expert mainly on Arctic sea ice. But he has already met Brent Constantz, who is the founder of Blue Planet, and therefore he’s as curious as I am, I think about this technology. Now, I’m going to do something that I have never done before. I’m going to give a little precis of what I think I have learned. And it’s taken me some struggle to kind of master some of this stuff. And so I’m going to I’ve written it down for my own edification. And I will share it with you in about five minutes spiel, and then I’ll ask Peter to really explain life, if he will. Okay, and this is what I think I’ve learned about this, insofar as I can master it at all. Concrete is the most used building material in the world. It accounts for 8% of the world’s co2 emissions. And most of that co2 comes from the manufacture of Portland cement, which is one of the components of concrete, the rest being what they call aggregate, mostly limestone –gravel plus water. Well, nowadays, there are efforts to reduce the co2 emissions of cement by replacing part of it with slag and fly ash, which are waste materials and that has brought the carbon footprint down considerably. However, those waste materials are now in short supply. Other innovators also inject co2 into the wet concrete, or some of them form concrete blocks which they cure inside containers holding co2, and that co2 is absorbed into the concrete blocks producing lower carbon concrete but not negative. All limestones including the White Cliffs of Dover and the Great Barrier Reef are simply the skeletal remains of marine organisms like corals, clam shells and lobster skeletons. So how about Let’s imitate nature’s way of creating limestone? Well, Blue Planet is a company that can now make carbon negative concrete by making a limestone aggregate that captures and sequesters so much carbon that it more than offsets the emissions of co2 from the cement-making process. Blue Planet uses demolished waste concrete, that’s one of the raw materials; they capture the calcium that’s already in it. They capture the co2 from any source, say from a power plant or a flue or just from the air. Regardless of the concentration. They never concentrate the co2 or turn it into a liquid to handle it. They use it in a dilute form diffused into the water to form carbonate, and they make calcium carbonate, which is limestone, out of it. Over 98% of the carbon on Earth is in limestone. Limestone is about 70% of all concrete. A ton of limestone contains 440 kilograms of mineralized co2, and there are 55 billion tonnes of rock mined every year. That’s 55 gigatons mined every year. Most of it is limestone used for construction. Well, that amount contains about 25 billion tonnes of co2, which coincidentally is about the amount we need to remove from the atmosphere every year. If we replaced all the rock now mined and substituted for it limestone aggregate created from co2, we will reduce the co2 in the atmosphere to a level comfortable for human habitation. Blue Planet gets its calcium from demolished concrete waste; they dissolve away all the calcium from the Portland cement part of it. And where they have left is the original old sand and gravel which they can reuse. Now I’m going to show a slide that illustrates this process. Now what this is is a scattering pattern of 100 nanometer micelles, which I understand are molecules in a colloidal solution, a liquid phase within another liquid phase, which is used in biomineralization by clamshells, for example. But Blue Planet does it quickly. They call this a liquid condensed phase. Carbonate ions will normally go through a membrane. But when they’re condensed into these 10th of a micron size phases, they can be modulated with ions and will not go through a membrane. So the stuff can be isolated and condensed and made into limestone with within minutes. When you mineralize co2 and form limestone, it’s permanent. It’s also profitable. Concrete is the only place where there’s an existing market for something that will sequester carbon on the scale necessary to reduce global warming. There you have my schpeel. Now, I tell me, Peter, am I mistaken about anything I said? And please, please clarify for these poor people.

Peter Fiekowsky  08:07

I visited the the Blue Planet plant yesterday saw I have new information and photos of production.  Okay, you’re welcome. Thank you. That’s a good summary, Quick summary, the things I would clarify:  the source of calcium, there’s a long list of sources from the lowest hanging fruit to the ultimate source. So the demolished concrete is the lowest —  the easiest, because you get paid a lot of money to take it away and convert it back into raw materials. Ultimately, the source of calcium would be the same as with oysters and clams in and so on, which is the ocean. So, in the middle, you have things like fly ash from coal plants.  The coal plants are disappearing, thank God, but this will help disappear the fly ash as well. Steel slag and a few other things like that. Another interesting source of calcium is the the water that comes up from oil wells. So if you think about it, the oil was formed in the ocean and shallow seas, and so the oil comes along with the water with which is salty, it has a lot of calcium in it. And in in places, especially in the US where we do fracking still, they have a big problem with getting rid of all that saline water.  Well, most of the problem is the calcium. So it actually becomes profitable. Again, hopefully only for another decade or so. You solve my problem, because the middle of the night it occurred to me, they’re just using waste concrete, well, that’s not going to last very long. They will run through that in a couple of years. So where they’re gonna get the rest of their calcium? So you say it’s not a problem? That’s not a problem. Perfect. All right.

Metta Spencer  10:33

Okay, go on. And whatever else needs to be said to, to steer our conversation in the right direction, Peter, right.

Peter Fiekowsky  10:43

So there’s two aspects of solving the problem, so that you use the 25 Gigatons per year. Which, if we were to replace all current rock production with synthetic limestone, then we could sequester 25 Giga tons per year, which is very cool, and absolutely good. Now, to actually restore the climate, we need to double that to 50 or 60 Giga tons per year. And then you say, Well, how are you going to do that? Because the market for that doesn’t exist yet. And there’s no fixed answer. But given that the process is not expensive, at all, that with sea level rise, a lot of our coastal cities will be abandoned. And some will just be gradually be raised year by decade by decade. And that raising will involve could involve huge amounts of limestone, which is perfect for the purpose, right? Limestone underlies the ocean anyway.

Metta Spencer  11:57

And the barriers that they would have to put up around to keep the water from flooding,

Peter Fiekowsky  12:06

Or just raise the buildings up a meter or two, you know, and that’s good for another 50 years, then raise up another meter or two, good for another 50 years. Right, so you have a market with profits, prosperous people, willing to easily able to pay for the synthetic limestone that way. So in the in the world of climate restoration, where we want to remove about 60 Gigatons of co2 per year, so we can get back to levels that humans have actually survived, right? So the UN says, well, let’s just try to stabilize at 460 parts per million, which is wonderful, especially if you’re a T Rex. Most of us aren’t T Rex, as most of us are humans, then our ecosystems are designed for 280. So we want to get back to 280, which is climate restoration. So that requires 60 gigatons. And so  the two different perspectives. They’re complementary, of course, but I’m very interested in the survival of humans, not T Rex. Nothing against T Rex.

Metta Spencer  13:29

So your your neighbor of the Blue Planet headquarters. Constantz, did you talk to him yesterday?

Peter Fiekowsky  13:36

He wasn’t there. I have lunch with scheduled with him next Friday.

Metta Spencer  13:41

Okay. What did you learn yesterday that was new and different. How are they doing? I understand they have they made a deal with Mitsubishi to create plants all over Asia. And Peter Wadhams mentioned that they’re building a plant in Italy, where he lives. So they must be growing like, you know, wildfire.

Peter Fiekowsky  14:04

They’re growing like wildfire. Yes, yes. I’ll show you a few slides of their plant. I’m not the best photographer.

Metta Spencer  14:12

I mean, they need to make these plants all over the places, not just one location. Okay, that’s your headquarters.

Peter Fiekowsky  14:19

Okay. Well, well, this is their plant headquarters is in Los Gatos, which if you know the Bay Area it’s six miles from me here in Los Altos.  Los Altos is the center of Silicon Valley. And Los Gatos is towards the hills, beautiful little little town. And then this factory, I’ll show you like four or five slides from this one on north of us in an industrial area where there are power plants and oil refineries, and stuff like that.

Metta Spencer  14:56

So the idea is, you need a lot of separate factories because you don’t want to have to transport stuff too far. So you have to put it pretty close to where there’s a flue or a source of calcium. Right?

Peter Fiekowsky  15:10

Right. Well, yeah, and more importantly, you want to put the factories close to where they’re used, because the main cost of rock is transportation carrying costs, the same as transporting the rock about 50 miles. So if your quarry is more than 50 miles away, it’s more cost effective to just manufacture the limestone nearby. And just so you can get a sense, the big thing at the top is processing all the detritus from a nearby refinery. Then you can see the rock piles. So this is gravel, this is sand. And this is some of the original, demolished concrete. So this is the input. This is a pipe that carries this co2 from the power plant across the street. I’ll show you a slide on that in a moment. But you can see the valve; it’s not very exciting. The whole thing is really delightfully boring. This is out of sequence. This is some of the final limestone.

Metta Spencer  16:27

How big are those little pellets?

Peter Fiekowsky  16:33

Oh, an inch. Yeah, so the biggest ones are you can see it is part of the process. In  their prototype in production, it’ll be much bigger. Here. This tank has. I don’t remember what the name of it is. Actually, this was just yesterday, I haven’t sorted these things out into order. The tower here is where they take the the the fluid that they dissolve the limestone calcium into. Here’s the exhaust pipe extended that I showed you earlier. And so it runs the air up and the fluid down this long pipe. And today they’re getting a new one in which is but four times the diameter and twice as tall.

Metta Spencer  17:36

I’m sorry, this is gases — co2 going up there? What?

Peter Fiekowsky  17:40

Yeah, yeah, exhaust from the natural gas power plant. Oh, I didn’t get it.

Metta Spencer  17:46

Okay, that’s where they’re capturing the co2.

Peter Fiekowsky  17:49

Yeah, yeah. So they can capture co2 from the air as well. But the co2 from the power plant is 100 times more concentrated, so it’s easier. They’ll need 100 times the surface area to capture the same amount of co2 from the air. And they’ll do that when they need to. But oh, you can see the power plant in the background here. You can see the the exhaust,  the steam coming out of the condenser.

Metta Spencer  18:17

What is it? That’s a real California power plant that’s powering electricity or what?

Peter Fiekowsky  18:24

That’s right. It’s a natural gas power plant. There’s a an oil refinery about a mile away that also will supply co2.

Metta Spencer  18:37

Okay, that’s wonderful. You all right, these are exciting.

Peter Fiekowsky  18:42

Enough. Yeah. Okay.

Metta Spencer  18:44

Let’s let people ask questions or make comments. I think let’s call on Chris. First. To respond to all this. I think it may be partly new to you, right?

Chris Cheeseman  18:56

Well, I’ve learned about the Blue Planet process only fairly recently. So yeah, the idea of making carbon negative aggregates for using concrete is a very good one. I think you’re right to say that there probably isn’t enough construction and demolition waste or waste concrete to have a big impact of global impact. And I’ll go with Peter. Peter says there’s enough calcium in solution that you can use to to make the type of volumes of minerals that he’s talking about. It seems it seems surprising to me. So, I mean, the other part of concrete of course, is the Portland cement. That’s the key bit. That’s the key binder. We don’t build stuff out of Portland cement. We build stuff out of concrete, but the Portland cement is the is the glue that sticks it all together. And of course that is associated with these enormous co2 emissions because of the way it’s made. The processing of the raw materials into Portland cement clinker is inherently carbon-emitting. The cement industry uses the same raw materials, limestone and clays primarily. And the temperatures are very high. To make the reactions that form Portland cement, you need 1450 degrees centigrade, that drives off the carbon dioxide from the calcium carbonate. So that’s one thing. And the fact that you need those high temperatures means that you’ve also got other other processing carbon dioxide emissions that you have. So our view is that you’ve got the aggregate but the Portland cement is a key component. And I was looking at some figures this afternoon. More Portland cement was made last year than in the whole of history; it was 4.4 billion tons — 4000 400 million tons of Portland cement. And about naught point seven, or 70% of the weight of pouring cement is emitted as carbon dioxide from those two sources,  heating the limestone and the high temperatures that you need to make make the reaction go. So we’re addressing that problem, the Portland cement problem. And personally, I’ve been involved in in this type of research over a number of years, and I’ve been down a number of alleys that haven’t led anywhere, really,  so one thing I’ve learned is that it’s very important to be part of the cement industry — to work with the Portland cement people because coming up with a new a totally new cement is incredibly problematic because the industry knows and loves Portland cement. So if you’re gonna make something, it’s got to be with Portland cement. Now, I think Peter or you mentioned coal-fired power station, fly ash, and blast furnace slag. They’re known as supplementary cementitious materials. They’re not cementitious in their own right. But in the environment, they react like cement to form the glue that sticks everything together, that forms the concrete. So we’ve been we’ve been trying to develop — not trying, we have developed —  a supplementary cementitious material, which is derived from magnesium silicate minerals. Why do we go for magnesium silicate? Well, magnesium silicates, the vast majority of the Earth’s crust, in fact, is made of magnesium silicates, the olivine type materials. Olivine is a term that captures magnesium silicates. And some of them have some iron in there as well. But it’s a whole range. There is absolutely megatons of this and it’s widely distributed around the world. So that makes it a very sensible thing to go for as your raw material to make this new supplementary cementitious material. We have a process that takes the way —

Metta Spencer  23:27

Let me ask, you said that this is not a substitute for Portland cement.

Chris Cheeseman  23:32

No, hold hold on, Metta. Hold on. We’ll come back to that. So we take the magnesium silicate and we basically dissolve it, we split it into the magnesium part and the silica part. What we find is that the silica part acts like the coal-fired power station fly ash or the class finished like it’s a supplementary cementitious material. The magnesium part we can carbonate, actually. It’s quite a similar process to that Blue Planet process. It’s calcium ions in solution, and it would be off-gases from any industrial process, you know, potentially a cement plant for example. And blending those two together produces a magnesium carbonate mineral rather than a calcium carbonate mineral that Peter was talking about. So because it’s absorbed that carbon dioxide onto the form that we need them — silicate and form the magnesium carbonate — the silica,  the supplementary cementitious material bit, is effectively carbon-negative and is compatible with existing cement manufacturing formulations. So that’s the approach which we are taking. And we’re not competing with Blue Planet. We’re certainly running in parallel with them, but addressing a different part of the concrete process.

Metta Spencer  25:06

I think I’ve actually seen a reference to the fact that they sometimes have considered combining some of these cement manufacturing innovations with their own aggregate innovation. So maybe maybe you guys could get together and mix your cement with their aggregate.

Chris Cheeseman  25:35

We could do, I think it’d be really good to hear Mike’s view on the importance of low carbon concrete infrastructure development, because Mike’s coming at it from a slightly different perspective for me, but I think you’ll find Mike’s perspective really useful.

Metta Spencer  26:00

Yes, Mike.

Mike Cook  26:03

Thanks, Chris. Well, yeah, I should say, I’m not really a cement expert, or even a materials expert. I’m a structural engineer. So I use concrete and steel and aluminium to make buildings,  to design buildings. But I have got very involved in the last couple of years with Chris and with the team that’s working on Seratech, because I think it is an incredibly interesting and potentially very valuable process, which which could help us in the industry, I work with the institutions, the Royal Academy, and so on, on working out hubs to allow us to decarbonize construction as a whole. And it doesn’t take long before you realize, as you said, Metta, that the contribution to the co2 emissions that come from making cement are so colossal that we really have to look at that. So my first interest, as someone who cares about climate emergency, and and uses cement, is how we’re going to decarbonize it. And so any process, I don’t mind who has it, what it is, that takes the co2 out of the flue, it gets my vote, if you like, the challenge. Well, two challenges. One is how the heck do you do that? How do you capture the co2? Now, fortunately, lots and lots of different people are coming up with ideas and setting up ways of capturing the co2? How do you do it cheaply? How do you do it in ways that don’t require that co2 to be as it is, in all cases, purified compressed into liquid, transported out, and buried at sea, for instance, which is something a lot of people think we have to do? How do we avoid all those expenses in that co2 capture? And cement isn’t the only an industry that has these huge co2 emissions, but it is from a construction industry point of view, the big emitter? And I think these mineralisation ideas, both Blue Planet answer take a sensible ways to go about it, because it’s simple, low, low temperature, low pressure, chemical processes that allow us to take the co2 out chemical reactions happen, and it creates byproducts. I think the importance of the ideal is that it’s not only a cheap process to carbon capture, but those byproducts are valuable, then you’ve got to sort of double when you you’re capturing carbon reasonably cheaply. And what you’re producing has a value. It’s not got to be waste, it’s not waste, it turns into something. And I think in both cases, Blue Planet and Seratech, it gets into buildings, if I understand correctly. With Blue Planet as aggregate, which is an incredibly bulky  product that goes into concrete. Or the Seratech, which can be an admixture with the cement. So yeah, the idea of putting the two together is quite interesting. But that brings you to the thing that Chris alluded to. And I’ve been talking to people about this potential only this afternoon. We know the construction industry, for good reason, is very conservative. It doesn’t take quite easily too serious innovation. And the cement industry, ditto, and a huge amount of infrastructure to make cement has been built up and a huge amount of experience and trust in the concrete as a building material. So I can use the concrete, I can put up a a tall building, and it’ll still be there in 100 years time, no problem. Once you start coming up with brand new materials, to expect people to trust it to still be there. In 100 years time is quite an ask, you’ve just got this material that’s embedded in our history. So anything which we can do, which does all those things catches the carbon produces valuable byproducts can go into cement slash concrete, doesn’t change it.

Metta Spencer  30:22

If anybody is really doubtful that the thing is going to hold up 100 years, why don’t you just show them the Pantheon, which is the Roman thing is that they they’re built with the best cement in the world back in the Roman days, and it’s beautiful stil? I mean, wouldn’t that convince anybody not to worry?

Mike Cook  30:46

No. You’ve got to do it with with the new material. I mean, to be frank, I’m sure it’s happened across the world, but I know in the UK in the last 50 years, people have fiddled with cement fiddled with concrete. And it’s had unexpected deleterious consequences, down the line, 10 years, 20 years later. And I know there are professors at Imperial College who’ve made a lot of research and done a lot about those degrading cements concrete. So there is a track record that says innovation can be quite risky already. So there’s going to be a nervousness. And we’ve got to satisfy funders, we’ve got to satisfy insurers. It’s not just the people who are going to live in these places, it’s actual people who are going to put their money into these places. You have to be certain so I just say that one of the attractions is, there’s a lot of innovations out there. And there’s a whole list of them happening in the states in the UK and Europe. Really, really interesting. You mentioned about bubbling the co2 into into the concrete as it cures, that’s a way of capturing some some co2 into buildings. Many, many other ideas. But the more they move away from the convention, both  the risks that that might represent to the insurers, to the developers and so on, and the inconvenience and the investment that would be required from the industry are two quite big detractors. And to be honest, right now, the penalties for this the co2 emissions that industry are producing, the penalties are not high enough, we are not penalizing industry, to force them into decarbonizing fast enough. This is something that’s going to come in the future. And I would say that what we’re talking about here are innovations that are going to be ready to step in, when people have finally realized they have to bite that bullet and capture carbon.

Metta Spencer  32:50

Okay, my impression is that this process, at least the Blue Planet process, I have no idea about this Seratech process, but that it’s cheap. I guess everything depends on transportation, but the process itself is no more expensive than conventional concrete. Which means that you don’t need to subsidize the use of it. And all that we have to do is get the government to say all government infrastructure (and God knows they build enough bridges and highways and things) all of these things should henceforth be made with carbon negative concrete. And that will create the market for it, and you’re home free. Am I wrong? Anybody ?

Peter Fiekowsky  33:41

Well, that’s most of it. I want to refer to important points that Mike made. Safety is critical. And the nice thing about synthetic limestone is it’s exactly the same chemical as natural limestone, but without the the variability that you get from the processes under the quarries or from the quarries. So it’s been tested at San Francisco airport for several years. And they’re very happy with it. And they’re, they’re improving their process to improve their control over the crystal structure. And ultimately, I think there’s every reason to expect that they’ll do much better than nature in terms of getting thedesired crystal structures. The other thing is, it’s important to contrast, the complementarity that Chris described between cement and the aggregate and the cubic yard (I apologize for being American but Blue Planet is also an American, look it up on their website). So a cubic yard of their aggregate contains over 1000 pounds of co2. And that’s sort of the benchmark, the admission from the amount of cement that goes into that cubic yard of concrete is about 600 pounds. And so the balance is about 550 pounds negative if using just standard Portland cement, which is great. Then if you take the innovative cement, which is as Mike pointed out, a little bit risky. And it’s not clear where you can use the innovative cement and where you can’t. But where you can,  then you can get from the negative 550 pounds per cubic yard, possibly all the way up to 1000 pounds per cubic yard, which is wonderful. And then as I said, if you use the synthetic limestone to build up the streets in San Francisco, as sea level rises, and in Shanghai, you don’t need cement, just to build to underlay the streets. So you can sequester a lot of carbon that way.

Mike Cook  36:07

I would just say that one of the important things about  the Seratech stuff that we’ve been looking at at Imperial College is that it’s identical to fly ash. So there is a history that’s not a new material and it in and it works with an existing cement industry entirely. So it doesn’t threaten an industry, it doesn’t waste all that infrastructure that’s built up. So the nice thing there is, is that that does, I think that should be possible for that to be accepted quite quickly. Tell me, um, Peter, the the aggregate, the limestone aggregates? Can that potentially replace all of the traditional aggregates and still get you high-strength concrete? Or is it something that you would, if you wanted a _____, I might be careful at what units I use, but a high-strength, tall buildings and floors, concrete, would I be able to replace all of my aggregate with that? Or is it just a proportion of it?

Peter Fiekowsky  37:10

You will be able to replace all of it. It’ll be a few years before you get the different varieties. One of the nice things is for a tall building, you want lightweight aggregate, which is can be different can be expensive. And it’s very inexpensive for them to make the lightweight.

Mike Cook  37:29

So through time, we’d be able to stop having to get aggregate out of the ground and start start making it. It’s incredibly complementary with with the Seratech process where we can stop doing both. Both are capturing capturing co2, both are locking it into new buildings, new buildings are going to be needed much as we love the idea of restoring and renovating and using our existing buildingsm we’re fortunate in the US in the UK to have a lot of buildings already there that we can restore and repair. And, of course, we will need some new ones, but there’s a whole chunk of humanity that hasn’t even started to create the buildings it will need as it grows and grows. And I don’t fancy my chances of telling everybody to stop doing that. So new concrete, this material is likely to be needed. Finding ways in combining it, you know, the cement and the aggregate both carbon capturing and making a bit material that goes straight into the new buildings is is a fantastic thing. Because actually, to be honest, it’s been worrying me that that we’ve been focusing in Imperial College on the cement, and that is focusing on the co2 emissions to a significant degree. But I do worry about continuing to get all this aggregate out of the ground and all this sand you know the forgetting any any co2 issues, the harm it does to the earth,  to nature, the disruption, that all of this activitym the quarrying and so on has, We’ve got to try and get away from that too.

Metta Spencer  39:13

Yes, how close are you Seratech guys to being as advanced in being able to manufacture stuff and get it into the market? In comparison with Blue Planet? Because obviously they have plants sprouting up all over the world? It How long is it going to take you to get that far a long?

Chris Cheeseman  39:39

I would say Well, that’s where we want to be. That’s where we’re looking for funding to go to that level, that sort of pilot plant scale. I think within a year there’s every every possibility will be there. And then hopefully growing from there, forward.

Metta Spencer  40:00

Okay, let’s open questions from other people. I’m sure I’m not the only one with a lot of issues.

Adele Buckley  40:09

Well, there are many questions, but it seems listening particularly to Mike Cook, that getting the government to accept that this is strong enough is important. What are the steps to getting demonstration that the concrete is as good as the existing kind, and even proving that it’s correct for the purpose? And then, after that, in an ideal world, having the government actually mandate, this kind of concrete as the only kind acceptable for new construction.

Peter Fiekowsky  40:54

Over several 100 years, there are standards for testing concrete, because any new concrete manufacturer, their product needs to be tested. And basically, they make a cylinder of maybe this diameter — maybe a foot high, and then they put it under a press with 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s of pounds of pressure until it crumbles. And it’s more sophisticated than that, but you can visualize that process. So  that’s well accepted and when you walk through the Blue Planet laboratory, you’ll see quite a few of these cylinders, where they’re cut, and you can see how they crumble and so on.  I’ve worked with some of their engineers, and the simultaneous development of the manufacturing process, the permitting, and the improving the crystallization control, all those are happening at pretty much the same pace. So within a few years, there’ll be a wide range of mineral types or crystal types, but I’m not a expert in that. So I apologize if I use if I’m using the wrong terms.

Metta Spencer  42:19

What about cases where Mike says they’ve later on found out that the thing wasn’t so good. Didn’t say test it beforehand with this testing method the Peter’s just mentioned? Could they have caught the problem beforehand, and they just cut corners and didn’t do enough testing? Or is the testing not convincing enough?

Mike Cook  42:50

Chris should have a go at that one because he goes back a lot further into concrete history than me.

Peter Fiekowsky  43:00

Mike, you can comment on this. There’s the rock itself, and the the chemistry of the rock. The chemistry is fairly simple, the crystal structure is interesting, then there’s the cement side. And that changes over time, because the co2 and water and other pollutants come in and affect the cement. So the two are different.

Mike Cook  43:26

I think we know enough now to be able to show that the things that went wrong 20, 30, 40 years ago, are well understood and tit can be clearly demonstrated, they do not apply here, just as they don’t apply in any of the concrete that we’re using now. And although you have to still be very, very careful that the materials that come to site that make of cement that you’re using, the concrete that you’re using, you have to be quite sure where everything’s come from, you have to be quite sure that you test  everything before it goes into the building, and so on. Building by building, a lot of testing is done. But no, so it’s not an insurmountable problem in terms of applying rigorous rigorous testing, undertaking quite detailed micro examinations of the concrete to demonstrate that the materials are complying with with materials that were that they need to comply with, There are tricky things, though.  In a building industry, the construction industry, we do have perhaps codes of practice, we have standards. And they can  become obstacles to change. And we have to write a new clause into the standards, and new page into the codes of practice. And so in order to make it 100% approved. If it was just a product we were producing, we could just test that product and that product would be okay. But if it’s wet concrete that’s being trucked into site, we need to show that we’re complying with  standards. So we have to work with the standard writers. At the same time, as we’re doing this research it’s the same time that we’re building prototypes. We need to work with the standard writers, and make sure that everything’s moving forward in parallel, so that we’re not suddenly shocked at the end, that we’ve put it into a building, we can’t get a stamp of approval from an engineer, and so on. But none of that is really insurmountable, it just has to be programmed in. And I would only say that, when we program it in, we don’t want to hang around, we have a climate emergency, that’s an emergency now. We can’t dally around and take 10 or 20 years to get all of the regulations in place, the testing in place, and to get the insurers willing to let us use this in a building. It has to happen quicker than that. So we have to speed up the processes. That probably takes a little bit more money because you have to get more people to do more, at a smaller period of time. Which is why getting industry to invest in this — and or government. If anybody wants to decarbonize at a serious rate, there needs to be investment. But this is the way that will keep our economy going. This is the way we’ll be able to carry on building the buildings we need, that the rest of the world would be carrying on able to develop markets for the products of our economies and so on. This keeps prosperity going. So seems like a good investment for government to me,

Metta Spencer  46:49

It seems to me that it’s not just a technological challenge, of how quickly can you build stuff and get it tested and get an economic problem solved, getting industry interested, and so on, but it is also simply a public relations problem. Because, as  somebody who’s interested in trying to change the world, every day, my obstacles are human stupidity, and conservatism, and unwillingness to look at new evidence, and so on. So the question to me is, how do you persuade people to even take a listen to what you’re proposing? And there’s where I get bogged down. Not only that, but of course, the political part too. We want to get politicians to think that they will get votes, if they if they put a bill through Parliament saying, you have to use a carbon negative concrete, if it’s available. How are we going to convince people that this is going to help them  in the next election?

Adele Buckley  48:00

Could I just ask a question to Chris. When is he going to have a pilot project? And, and also a totally different aspect of things? The world in Asia is full of concrete, and a huge amount of construction. I’m not sure if their standards are comparable to the ones in the western world  but in any case, there’s going to be more construction, I think, in the non western world, then we’re what we are. We need in the best of all worlds to move this activity around the world, not just where we are and where we are familiar.

Chris Cheeseman  48:57

Well, I think the pilot plant question comes down to funding and there is funding available in this area, but we need to get some of that. And so, I think within 12 months, we’ll have a pilot plant, I hope.

Peter Fiekowsky  49:11

Okay, I can answer respond to your question about how do we convince people? And Chris pointed to the key thing. As I’ve been in this field for a while, the question I always ask is, who do I need to convince and what do I need to convince them? And Chris pointed that the most of the time we need to convince people who have a checkbook to write a check. And then the question is, what do you have to convince them? And part is sometimes you’ll want to convince that person with a checkbook that they’ll make money. But  there are a lot of billionaires around. I think it’s 5000 or 10,000  now. And they’re really not that worried about making more money and they pretend they are. But I know enough of them to know that that mostly they want to make a difference. Because the hardest thing in the world is to really make a difference for your children. And so then the thing that convinced them is that the world is going in this direction, I am not going to look like an idiot. And no Metta, what you’re doing here with Pugwash is an important part of that. When you have a bunch of senior people saying the world is going that way, people listen to gray hairs. That’s probably why we evolved to get gray hair when we get old. There’s a certain respectability that comes. So I think you’re doing the exact right thing, Metta, getting the gray hairs to talk about it– and the youth, right, they’re the opposite sides. But people listen to the youth in a similar way.

Mike Cook  51:05

I think I’d like to say I mean that in the in the world that’s already fairly developed, and that is government where governments are committing pretty seriously to decarbonizing and they take the Paris accord seriously, and so on, you know, they will probably over a period of years get serious about forcing decarbonisation, so long as they can see very clearly that it won’t harm the economy, it won’t cut back growth. They can’t afford that. Nobody wants to see it. It certainly won’t win them votes. But I believe that they will understand a duty to decarbonize, once they see there are ways to do it, which will not cause massive economic harm. That  at the moment they haven’t seen enough of, and they’re very nervous, I know the British government is showing signs of nervousness about the impact that  net zero could have on the economy. They’re asking us, please show us that it works. And we need to show them that a very healthy economy can be net zero. But we then we returned to the rest of the world which hasn’t yet developed, which is still developing its construction industry and its concrete industry, and so on, to bring better lives to its people, I think we’re going to have to recognize that we’ve got a balance, we can live with the consequences of climate change, if we just continue, allow them to start to develop and create more co2. The consequence of that is so dire, when you look forwards to the impact on people, the impacts on immigration, the potential conflicts of borders, and so on, that surely the Western world has to see ways of — okay, a small investment in making sure as you develop your cement and concrete industry to develop your cities to make our lives better, we’re going to help inject into that some technology that’s going to go into actually decarbonize it as well. If there is an extra cost, you know, I think there has to be a level of responsibility that;s shared because we are sharing the consequences. And so I think we’re going to see some of that. And I think it’s because the consequences of allowing climate change to go unabated are so much more expensive and so much more harmful to our economies, that it’s the only common sense thing to do.

Adele Buckley  53:54

I would like to suggest that there is a place in Canada, which could be a good place for such a project. And this is in the oil sands, because they they already have a sort of terrible reputation for not doing enough. They are capturing co2. So it’s available. They probably are using concrete. They have lots of money, and they would make themselves look better, if they would would do a project of this sort.

Mike Cook  54:31

Do you know anyone we can call?

Adele Buckley  54:35

Not right away. But I think this this could be followed at some at some point in the progress.

Mike Cook  54:42

 I also understand from someone I was talking to today that in Canada they have they have some quite interesting policies to encourage startups, innovative startups, maybe low carbon innovative startups to more rapidly expand and industrialize, so it might harmonize well with good government policies in Canada.

Metta Spencer  55:10

Adele, you have a history of working in that kind of area, the entrepreneurial end of things. Do you know what he’s talking about? Because I haven’t heard of the wonderful things that Canada is doing to help startups.

Adele Buckley  55:27

Well, I’m not sure that I can expound much on this, because my history is a bit old. But there is an environmental organization or group called Clean Tech, I think this is what Mike has heard about. And they definitely foster new projects. In Toronto, there’s the Mars District, which also fosters new technologies. And the Canadian government is notoriously cheap, hard to work with. Generally, it’s not going to be that easy to collect their money, but with a proper application, and justification for why this does seem like something that would actually appeal to political minds, because it would look good.

Mike Cook  56:29

No, it’s definitely I was told look at Canada. We were talking about UK, the lack of government assistance to help the academic world and the industrial world come together with bringing new innovations to market. And they were saying look at the Canadian model, look at the French model, look at the Israeli model. That was this afternoon, I had that conversation. So I haven’t really looked but we shall see. Maybe they were over optimistic.

Chris Cheeseman  56:58

I just like to ask Peter, in the Blue Planet process, the leaching the calcium from waste concrete. What happens to the rest of the concrete that isn’t the calcium? The silica part of it? What are they doing with that?

Peter Fiekowsky  57:15

Oh, you can probably guess.  It gets used for new concrete. That sounds a very, very profitable little process.

Chris Cheeseman  57:23

Yeah. Okay.

Metta Spencer  57:26

Well, that’s encouraging. Yeah. Okay. Well, I feel hopeful, I think we have a solution to all our global problems. And all we have to do is figure out how to get other people to understand it and chip in. Thank you all, it’s been a really worthwhile conversation. I think, please share this. I think that everybody needs to know this stuff, and pass the word around, because that’s part of the process, I think. Getting people aware that there are answers and that we can just move on with it. All right. So thank you all and carry on! Okay, bye. Bye.  Project Save the World produces these shows. And this is episode 512. You can watch or listen to them as audio podcasts on our website tosavetheworld.ca. That’s where people share information about six global issues. To find out a particular talk show its title or episode number in the search bar, or the name of one of the guest speakers. Project Save the World also produces a quarterly online publication, Peace Magazine. You could subscribe for $20 Canadian per year. Just go to pressreader.com on your browser, and in the search bar, enter the word paste. You’ll see buttons to click to subscribe.