Making the greenhouse gas sleep with the fishes
The Holy Grail: Carbon-Capturing Cement
The Novacem process has two main benefits; creating magnesium oxide doesn’t release CO2, and turning it into cement requires less than half the energy required to create traditional Portland cement. Even better, when the cement hardens, it absorbs 1.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which means that the technique actually removes more than 0.7 metric tons of CO2 for every ton of cement produced. That offers enormous carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) potential.
Limestone is nicely segregated into large mountains and quarries. Is there a suggestion for finding similar concentration at scale for magnesia? Oh, wait… we can grow magnesium-concentrating algae and plants on a vast goverment-subsidized scale.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Relative_abundance_of_elements.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust
Calcium 4.1%
Magnesium 2.3%
Everything else being equal (it isn’t – in way the wrong direction), double the price of cement. Enviro-whinerism: expensive, shoddy, deadly.