RE:RE:Plasma in the cement industryMcInnis Cement Plant Here’s a little info about pet coke, which McInnis uses as burner fuel (it’s not pretty):
Pet coke is a cheap, carbon-rich solid material that is a byproduct of oil refining. It’s an extremely polluting fuel, that emits 5% to 10% more CO2 than coal on a per-unit-energy basis when burned (and about 28% more than Fuel oil). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Relative_CO2_emission_from_various_fuels It may be cheap, but that comes at a cost of quite a bit of GHG emissions. If you take into account that the McInnis cement plant puts out about 1
.76 million tons of CO2 per year, and about 35%-40% of that comes from combustion in the kiln burners (the rest is from the calcination reaction).
That adds up to
616,000 to 704,000 tons CO2 annually from burning pet coke. That’s huge.
Going back to the biomass option that is mentioned in the tva article
https://www.tvanouvelles.ca/2020/06/27/la-pollution-cachee-des-papetieres-quebecoises-1 electriqueman posted, biomass is much more expensive than pet coke, not as efficient as fossil fuels, and not entirely clean either. Uncontrolled biomass production can also lead to deforestation. It's not a viable long-term solution IMO.
Pyrogenesis’ plasma torches however are a clean and efficient technology, relying only on sufficient quantities of cheap electricity, to provide the same heat quantity as the burners they replace. Carbon taxes are rising in Canada and expected to hit 50$/ton CO2 by 2022, and these companies are trying to jump ahead now before their bottom line takes a hit and outside pressures (from investors, financial institutions, public opinion, etc.) become too heavy to bear. Looking even farther into the future, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted the price of carbon needs to reach $184 a tonne by 2030 to shake enough consumers from their carbon-heavy lifestyles. You can imagine how these polluting heavy industries must be sweating at the prospect of such hefty taxes.
On a side note,
I am fairly certain that Pyrogenesis is already in contact with McInnis Cement regarding their efforts to reduce GHG. McInnis did put out a request for carbon capture / other clean technologies several months ago, and the article was forwarded to Peter on Agoracom who sent it to his team… so they’re likely one name among many on the list of companies Pyro are now in discussions with.
Vattenfall and Cementa The following link
https://odr.chalmers.se/bitstream/20.500.12380/257463/1/257463.pdf, is a study of the Evaluation of plasma torches in cement production. It’s a Masters study done by Chalmers University in Sweden, the same University that did the Plasma torch study for Iron Pelletization (in coordination with LKAB), and has been posted by others on the board, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph in it.
The thesis proposes that the heating in the cement process can be electrified by replacing the combustion of fossil fuels and their burners with electricity and plasma torches as the optimal solution:
According to Cementa’s preliminary investigations report, electrification of the system is a better economical alternative with less energy consumption to reduce their CO2 emissions than other CO2 extraction methods, e.g. amine extraction. Implementing electrification would mean no combustion of fossil fuels in the process, leading to a decreased amount of CO2 out of the stack. In their investigation, existing possibilities, effect on the electrical system and business prerequisites were examined. The heating technologies they have considered are plasma, electrical flow heaters, microwave heating, resistive electrical heating, inductive heating, direct separation reactors and hydrogen combustion. Based on the results of the investigation the preferred alternative for heating in the kiln is plasma torches, with CO2 as the preferred working gas. There are some technical aspects that would have to be worked out using plasma torches in the rotary kiln, it is different than the application in the Induration furnace in Iron Pelletization, but is a challenge worth pursuing for Pyro. The cement market is huge after all. Following the successful results of their plasma torch testing with RISE, it feels like a natural extension for them to work on torch projects for both the HYBRIT and CemZero initiatives in Sweden.
If you want to read more about CemZero the article below summarizes key points from the Thesis paper with a few additional information:
https://bioenergyinternational.com/heat-power/vattenfall-and-cementa-take-the-next-step-towards-a-climate-neutral-cement