>And yeah - it still won't be carbon neutral, but a significant reduction in a very carbon intensive process is still better than not doing it.

In the absence of superior alternatives which should always be pursued first in order of efficiency.

>Pulling it from the air does seem incredibly inefficient when the concentrations will be much higher in the exhaust and waste gasses than the atmosphere. This is where I think the journalistic error occurs. The article says they'll use the AirCapture technology - but I suspect they'll use that technology within a closed system - not just pulling it from the nearby atmosphere.

And it is incredibly inefficient but as marketing it works - the comments here are proof of it.

I meant overestimate how much carbon it removes and underestimate how much it costs to remove carbon from the air.

And its not a new technology that can be improved with iteration - CO2 always takes energy to remove and its other ingredients always take energy to create.

Until we get essentially carbon free and cheap energy there's no excuse to waste it on low carbon concrete when we can use those resources more efficiently elsewhere.

If you're going to waste energy on physically removin CO2 from the air then you're best bet is giving China and India free solar panels rather than using solar panels to remove CO2 to put in concrete

we're talking about sequestering carbon from the air and storing it. Low carbon concrete isn't even carbon neutral.

I think you overestimate how expensive low-carbon concrete is and how much carbon it actually takes to make.

I wish we had the luxury of worrying about 50 years from now.

I think it's a waste of time and money and if we're going for pie in the sky like this we and we might as well throw the money at fusion or something instead since that might give us the energy for us to do something like this in the first place.

Yeah, further up I said we're better off fertilizing the oceans or dumping sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere than doing this active sequestration shit when we don't have cheap abundant energy.

You might as well just give china and india free solar panels instead.

Your money would be better spent giving india and china free solar cells than this pie in the sky active sequestration shit. That can wait until we actually have cheap and carbon neutral energy to throw at it.

We'd be better off just biting the bullet and going for ocean fertilization or dumping sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere if we're that desperate.

I never said we stop using concrete, just that you will reduce carbon in the atmosphere more effectively if you use normal concrete and cheaply plant trees instead of using more expensive low carbon concrete. As an added bonus you get more building material too.

Carbon neutrality doesn't require every technology to be low carbon so long as you offset the carbon you produce.

Every extra dollar you spend on low carbon concrete would have been better spent buying normal concrete and using the savings to plant trees.

It's absolutely a bad approach.

We already have a method of installing CO2 extracting plants that have:

1. A higher yield in building materials
2. Produce building material with higher carbon storage capacity
3. Can pull CO2 out of the air without supplying any power
4. Require no construction to install

These incredible high efficiency CO2 extracting plants are called trees. Every penny they spent on this plant would have been more productively spent on literal plants.

It's proven science, it just requires space, material, manpower, and energy that makes it either unjustifiably inefficient at best or a net loss. You gotta read the fine print with optimism blindfold.

For instance, if you took all the money that went into funding this project and instead spent it planting trees you'd remove more CO2. Concrete isn't exactly carbon neutral and neither is the energy spent separating or storing CO2.