While most of the focus in the climate change mitigation debate has been on power generation and transport, there are a number of other emissions sources which are large and pose mitigation challenges of their own. Andrew Bartlett has often raised the issue of emissions from farm animals, and emissions from forestry have come up repeatedly here. But one that doesn’t get much attention is emissions from industrial processes, particularly the production of steel and concrete. Locally, manufacturing cement makes up less than 1% of total emissions (which is the kind of thing you can find out from the excellent AGEIS tool), but globally it’s a different story – getting definitive statistics is hard, but this IHT article quotes around 5% of global emissions, most of it in the developing world.
But a new Australian company claims they’ve got an alternative available that reduces the life cycle emissions from concrete by about 80% compared to standard, Portland cement-based concrete. Zeobond, a Melbourne company, use something called “geopolymers” to make concrete that doesn’t contain any cement. And, even better, we can apparently already buy their product – though they’re not exactly forthcoming with pricing information at this point. In any case, they’re featuring on the ABC’s Catalyst on Thursday night, along with a story on London’s plans to generate its own energy. Should be worth a look, either on TV or as a podcast.
As far as steel goes, the only substantial research program for reducing the emissions of steel production is the European ULCOS project. It appears that eliminating CO2 emissions from steel production almost inevitably means carbon capture and storage. Like it or lump it, it seems that we’re going to need CCS technology, whatever we do about coal.
I’ll be interested to see the Catalyst thing. From the little there is on the website, this sounds a bit like how the Romans made concrete using volcanic ash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozzolana).
Does the carbon dioxide absorbing magnesium oxide based cement deserve a mention?
Out of curiosity I range them. Only available in Melbourne right now but they are “in discussions” with other places.
Pricing? About a 15% premium over concrete. I guess that will come down over time.
Meat and milk are becoming dangerous and decadent luxuries if bovine methane is such a significant factor. As both meat and milk are not strictly necessary nowadays why not turn these ’sacred cows’ into something like Big Macs?
Then as a side benefit we could replace hard-hoofed animals in the Aussie environment with local species such as Kangaroo’s whose footprints cause far less erosion. Scientists say Australia’s topsoil is going to become a lot more dry and friable so we need to act on this vital issue and phase out beef cattle meat – later for milk cows.
Ahh I see someone got in first with a mention of Eco-cement. Mind you, the quality of their website doesn’t inspire confidence.
Hmmm. On some very, very rough Googled figures, right now that comes to about $40 per tonne of CO2 emissions avoided.
That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than solar panels…
There is no substitute for milk!
Can’t eat ‘roo everyday, I want my steak! (tho chicken & pork & fish do grace my plate occasionally)
Anyway, the methane emitted by cows comes from grass, not from coal or oil, part of normal cycle (like burning firewood.) The grass will fix more carbon, cows will eat it etc
I say we just go back to using human pyramids. Cheap, biodegradable, easily replaced. Somewhere, somebody’s always busy makin’ more.
Oh, and don’t forget about rice. We have to give up eating rice, because of the methane.
You break it to Hu Jintao.
Yeah but the amount of CO2 produced by steel production is tiny compared with that from electricity generation. The problem with CCS is one of scale. On a small scale its certainly feasible, but when you have to find a hole to hide 16 cubic kilometres of CO2 each and every day, you run into a few … er, issues.
professor rat, I’ll let you drink the grass milk and eat revolting ‘roo meat. I’ll stick with beef and hogget, thanks.
I’d like to know why ruminants are only a danger to the environment now, when for hundreds of millions of years, before humans evolved, the planet was swarming with ruminants producing god knows how much methane. Just a thought.
jane, I have absolutely no figures for it, but I suspect the number of ruminants on earth now is more than there have ever been. And anyway, it’s a silly question, we’re talking about anthropocentric climate change, and those cows are there because of us.
I’m a meat eater and I like it, and roo isn’t a perfect substitute for beef, but I’m slowly coming to accept that I probably have to give up beef. The recent major expansion of feedlotting in Australia makes the case worse. Still not quite like the US experience, but getting there. BTW, most of the water use etc figures for beef are, excuse the pun, total bullshit, because they are based on US data and we do not have the same practices.
I will always go lamb anyway, it’s much better on the environment.
Robert Merkel said:
Is that BOTE (back of the envelope) calculation for zeowhassname or Eco-cement?
I wonder how much of the objection to kangaroo meat is emotional.
Where I grew up I heard stories of earlier times when the locals, who had a weird sense of humour, would feed a visitor a meal of wallaby stew, ask him how he enjoyed it (invariably positive) then tell him (always a him) what he’d eaten, watch his face turn green and then piss themselves laughing when he ran outside and contributed his meal to the chooks or obliging dogs.
professor rat, if you’ve examined a kangaroo’s teeth and the shape of the jaw you’d find that they can snip grass off at zero millimeters. They too can destroy landscapes with overgrazing if we get liverish about harvesting them. And I’m not sure what the ratio of feed to body weight gain is. I suspect that they are multiples less efficient at converting feed into body mass than bovines bred for the purpose.
Robert, my favourite GHG emissions flow chart shows cement at 3.8% worldwide, livestock at 5.1% and rice cultivation at 1.5%. If we take Monbiot’s notion of 90-95% reductions in the advanced economies seriously, cement and livestock are very significant indeed. Even at 60-80% targets they loom large.
But does anyone have a good ongoing source for international and world GHG accounting? I haven’t been able to find any.
Brian, AFAIK all international carbon accounts are aggregated from national Kyoto compliant rules. Massively rubbery, but probably little moreso than financial figures.
(NOT an expert).
In 2005, 11% (62 Mt CO2-e) of Australia’s emissions were methane emissions from livestock, primarily from beef production. This is more than our emissions from passenger cars. We also emitted 53 Mt CO2-e from land clearing, much of this was driven by cattle grazing as well. Grazing and overgrazing also contribute to emissions from loss of carbon in soil and biomass, this is not included in Australia’s greenhouse accounts but research from the CRC for greenhouse gas accounting suggests that destocking 94.8 Mha of rangelands in WA would sequester between 290 and 1170 Mt CO2-e.
So if we are going to stabilise greenhouse gas levels at a non-dangerous level we are going to have to do something about emissions from livestock, especially beef.
Land use, land use change and forestry is also very important. While emissions from land clearing in Australia are lower than emissions from agriculture, land use change is the only area where it is practical to have negative emissions. The problem is that uncertainty in measurement may make this very difficult to incorporate into an emissions trading framework. One solution may be to invest public funds (perhaps raised from auctioning permits in an ETS) on reforestation and afforestation. Another (related) possibility is to have a separate market for emissions from agriculture and forestry. This could be price based or quantity based, if it was price based you could have a carbon tax which would be negative for reforestation and afforestation.
This is all made more complicated by the Kyoto accounting framework. If you log a native forest for example, then provided forest is allowed to grow back, then it doesn’t count as deforestation. However, if an old growth forest is logged, the forest that grows back will still eventually not store nearly as much carbon as the original forest.
aidan: That’s for Zeowatitsname.
By the way, amongst the more interesting proposals for geoengineering I’ve heard is something very like that Eco-cement.
Brian: yeah, nobody likes to eat Skippy. But, logically, I can’t see that it’s any worse ethically than eating beef.
I’d also add that kangaroo is damn tasty, if prepared well. But it’s more difficult to cook than beef.
Brian, I’m not sure about good sources for world GHG accounting, but sources include cait.wri.org and earthtrends.wri.org. A background paper for the Garnaut review (Emissions in the Platinum Age: the implications of rapid development for climate change mitigation) uses an estimate of 1.0 Gt CO2 in 2005 for cement production. They use data from ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/ndp030/nation.1751_2004.ems – a very big text file with country by country data. Aggregating this data would be a nice little text processing programming exercise.
I personally find kangaroo much tastier than beef, the trick is to not overcook it. It is also good to marinate it in red wine
Brian said:
One issue for some (not me) who don’t like their meat bleeding is that it doesn’t do so well cooked well done.
I think I read somewhere that the feet of the kangaroos are much better on the australian vegetation than your run of the mill cattle. So whilst its still possible to destroy vegetation (aka whats happening in at a Canberra defence site at the moment), it tends to have a lower impact.
Chris, of course if you are farming kangaroos you’d naturally keep the numbers within sensible limits. I believe it is now available in supermarkets throughout Australia. We had some recently and I liked it. I also don’t like rare meat, but my better half is a great cook.
It is very lean and virtually fat free.
we switched from beef to roo about a year ago and haven’t looked back. Roo is widely available (at Coles, for example), cheaper than beef, leaner, softer-footed (thus better for Australian soils), non-methane-emitting and – as far as I’m concerned, just damn delicious. I use roo mince for bolognaise and chilli with great success, fillets for stir fries; my husband makes an awesome roo steak cooked with bourbon, green pepper and cream. It does taste different to cow but you adjust quickly. I’ve come to dislike beef flavour since switching.
The vast majority of the public as well as politicians and bureaucrats view the climate crisis and greenhouse gases in terms of (reputed) SOURCES and SINKS, without fully understanding the CARBON CYCLE or how it could be enhanced. Methane from ruminants is a part of this cycle – plants absorb Carbon from the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2) and convert it into carbohydrates – the animal eats the plant and releases this Carbon back into the atmosphere as methane (CH4) – methane is broken down in the atmosophere into CO2 and water – the plants absorbs this CO2 – and the CYCLE begins again.
see http://www.soilcarbon.com.au for more information on kicking the CARBON CYCLE back into gear.