A first-of-its-kind California startup has found a way to remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it in concrete. Its factory is east of the company’s San Francisco Bay Area HQ, in Tracy, CA.
UC Berkeley grad, and former UC Berkeley professor, Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of the Dept of Energy, visits Heirloom Carbon Technologies’ carbon removal plant in Tracy, CA (from San Francisco Chronicle)
Rocks are some of the planet’s most vital carbon sinks. Over geological timescales (thousands of years), CO2 from the atmosphere binds to minerals and permanently turns to rock – a process known as carbon mineralization. Limestone is one of the most abundant rocks on the planet, capturing massive amounts of CO2 from the air over years. Heirloom’s technology accelerates this natural thousands-of-years process to just days. They’ve developed the most affordable and scalable Direct Air Capture technology in the world, offering the highest quality carbon removal credits available for purchase.
The key ingredient to Heirloom’s CO2 direct air capture is heat and limestone, which is made up of CO2 and calcium oxide. The process works like this: CO2 is removed from limestone through heating (900 degrees Celsius) and the CO2 is stored for use in making concrete. After heating, the remaining calcium oxide acts as a sponge and absorbs CO2 from the environment in a direct capture process. Limestone is recreated and then heated to remove its CO2. The CO2 is then stored. The process is repeated. The removed CO2 is stored in concrete, where it can’t escape into the atmosphere, even if the concrete is broken up or recycled. Once new CO2 is reabsorbed into the altered limestone, which takes about three days, the process then starts over again. The Tracy facility has the potential to remove 1,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year — the work of about 500 trees and using much less space than the trees.
Heirloom is currently in talks to build these plants in other states.
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