Carbon Capture in Concrete and the Global Climate Crisis
Salvific Solution or a Vicious Circle? Our Singularity Think Tank expert Dr. Agnès Petit Markowski shares her first-hand insights on how carbon capture may hinder substantial change within the construction industry.
Capturing and utilizing CO2 in concrete can potentially help in the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But will it solve the global climate crisis? “It cannot be the only solution”, says Dr. Agnès Petit Markowski, Singularity Think Tank expert and Founder/CEO of Mobbot. Her company provides solutions for digitizing the process of shotcrete — a construction technique for spraying concrete at high velocity onto a surface for stabilizing structures and building elements.
“The construction industry is a main contributor to Earth’s resource- and space crisis,” she says. “You can’t solve this with CCU and carbon credits. It requires a new way of building altogether. Paying credits for CCU in concrete is a wrong bet because it strengthens the vicious circle in which the construction industry is caught up.” In a recent essay in the New York Times, professors of MIT have voiced similar concerns over the false promise of carbon capture projects in the fossil fuel industry.
Petit Markowski is concerned that receiving credits for capturing CO2 removes the incentive to change the way companies build and maintain an overuse of concrete. Concrete manufacturing generates CO2 emissions with the combustion of fossil fuels and in the processes of thermally decomposing calcium carbonate. In addition, sand — the main element in cement and the second-most used resource after water — is over extracted and in short supply due to the global construction boom, requiring concrete producers to source it with high environmental impact.
In recent years, capturing and recycling CO2 for future use — Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) — has seen a growing interest in the concrete industry. Concrete naturally absorbs CO2, similar to the way sea water captures carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. New technologies to mineralize CO2 and embed it into fresh concrete enables concrete producers to sequester more CO2 without compromising its durability. Emerging approaches include the carbonation of recycled concrete aggregates, CO2 sequestration in alternative Magnesium oxide (MgO) based binders, CO2 mineralization in industrial waste-derived aggregates and fillers, and CO2 dissolution in mixing water.
Smarter building design and value chain optimization
With cement and concrete contributing about 8% to global CO2 emissions, the construction industry faces an urgent need to reduce its carbon footprint. “The problem with earning carbon credits for CCU is that it does not incentivize the concrete and construction industries to reduce emissions from harmful use of resources and production, but instead enables higher CO2 emissions in the supply chain,” says Petit Markowski. Recent studies have similarly cautioned that in assessing the benefits of CCU, the total life cycle CO2 emissions from CCU concrete production should consider emissions from the energy required to capture, transport, and utilize CO2.(Footnote 1, 2) Moreover, CO2 emissions involved in concrete production and use are only one angle on sustainability, whereas environmental impact extends much further into the footprint of sand extraction, water use, and resource logistics.
If CCU’s promise cannot be held, what are some of the solutions that can work? “Reducing CO2 emissions and the overall consumption of construction resources is first and foremost a matter of smarter building designs and better control over the value chain,” notes Petit Markowski. “Digital design and fabrication technologies can help constructors to significantly improve the value chain’s impact, primarily by reducing job-site waste, which accounts for up to 50% of the materials used on construction sites.” Digital fabrication technologies enable designs that reduce material need and waste up front and offer companies better control over the construction process. Indeed, a little-known fact is that constructors waste a lot of material because they don’t know exactly how much material they need.
“An additional objective should be to reconsider the old way of looking at safety norms,” notes Petit Markowski. “Construction engineers need to take many safety norms into consideration, but the industry is stuck in the past and doesn’t sufficiently consider the ways in which new technologies offer risk-reducing process improvements to working conditions on site and worker well-being opportunities. A smarter approach to technology can significantly help with better designs as well as shorter value chains and just-in-time delivery. “We have to become better at applying digital technology to advance the entire construction value chain, reduce overall resource use, and enhance workers safety.”
Footnotes:
About The Singularity Group (TSG)
The Singularity Group makes applied innovation investable in listed equities. TSG is the initiator of the Singularity Index™ (Bloomberg ticker: NQ2045), a global, all-sector benchmark and gold standard for applied innovation. The Singularity Strategies include The Singularity Fund (UCITS Lux) and the Singularity Small&Mid (UBS AMC). The Swiss investment boutique works closely with the Singularity Think Tank, a network of entrepreneurs and academics with deep insight to innovation value chains. Their input forms the foundation of TSG’s proprietary innovation scoring system that quantifies the engagement of companies within a set of curated Singularity Sectors worldwide across all market capitalizations and industries. The Singularity Score defines how much value listed companies are generating through applied innovation.
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