The Race for Limestone as Climate Change’s Big Solution: Sulzer, Blue Planet Sign Key Partnership

BioChemicals/Renewable Chemicals, Business News/Analysis, California, Carbon Capture, Carbon Capture, Co-Products, Feedstocks, Funding/Financing/Investing, Infrastructure, Not Agriculture, Process, R & D Focus, Sustainability

July 23, 2021

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) … Sulzer and Blue Planet have signed a significant partnership for converting CO2 into limestone. … Sulzer is enabling the further development and optimization of Blue Planet’s innovative carbon mineralization process for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) solutions. The process will leverage Sulzer’s carbon reduction technologies to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrial activities, for example by supporting the cement industry to produce carbon neutral or carbon negative concrete.

Sulzer Chemtech is developing an efficient and effective carbon capture unit that will be a key enabler in Blue Planet’s process. This will be installed in Blue Planet’s pilot plant, which is being constructed in Pittsburg, California, USA, and will capture emissions from an adjacent natural gas-fired power plant. The facility will leverage Sulzer Chemtech’s technologies providing high CO2 absorption performance while maintaining low energy consumption.

The technology

Blue Planet is developing a profitable and sustainable CCUS system that captures CO2 from a variety of emission sources. These include power, steel, cement, refining, direct air capture and other CO2 emitting industries.

Blue Planet’s technology uses CO2 as a raw material for making carbonate rocks. The carbonate rocks produced are used in place of natural limestone rock mined from quarries, which is the principal component of concrete. CO2 from flue gas is converted to carbonate (or CO3=) by contacting CO2 containing gas with a water-based capture solutions. This differentiates Blue Planet from most CO2 capture methods because the captured CO2 does not require a purification step, which is an energy and capital intensive process. As a result Blue Planet’s capture method is extremely efficient, and results in a lower cost than traditional methods of CO2 capture.

To reform the capture solution, it is exposed to a “Geomass” which is Blue Planet’s term for common rock waste and/or industrial waste materials that contain available alkalinity, which recharges the capture solution, and metal ions such as calcium, magnesium, and iron. When the “spent” capture solution reacts with the Geomass, reforming it, these metal ions are released and combined with the carbonate solution to form the carbonate mineral coating.

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With this process the CO2 footprint of cement in the concrete is more than off-set. READ MORE

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