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Comment by avmich

5 years ago

Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement.

I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see that.

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avmich

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epistasis  5 years ago

I was tremendously surprised recently by some of the clever work on making cement without CO2 emissions, starting exactly 60 minutes into this talk:

https://youtu.be/E76q-9q7ZDg

Standard hydrolysis for making (green) hydrogen from water using electricity also creates excellent chemistry for the cement process.

We must anticipate an era where there are periods of zero-marginal-cost energy so plentiful we can't use it all, followed by periods of undersupply. Storing electrical energy in hydrogen may seem completelt uneconomical right now, but combining that process with cement production could result in fantastic efficiency of process. We are going to need carbon-neutral cement somehow, and if we get hydrogen with it, and CO2 feedstock for other purposes, we may be in a really good position for all sorts of processes.

Industrial processes have been under examined as we try to become carbon neutral. That means that there's tremendous opportunity, not that it's impossible. Humans are clever when we are allowed to be, we just haven't put much innovative thought into our industrial processes in a long time, much less resigned then from the ground up!