Sousa, V.; Silva, A.; Nogueira, R. Assessment of the Carbon Storage Potential of Portuguese Precast Concrete Industry. Buildings2024, 14, 384.
Sousa, V.; Silva, A.; Nogueira, R. Assessment of the Carbon Storage Potential of Portuguese Precast Concrete Industry. Buildings 2024, 14, 384.
Sousa, V.; Silva, A.; Nogueira, R. Assessment of the Carbon Storage Potential of Portuguese Precast Concrete Industry. Buildings2024, 14, 384.
Sousa, V.; Silva, A.; Nogueira, R. Assessment of the Carbon Storage Potential of Portuguese Precast Concrete Industry. Buildings 2024, 14, 384.
Abstract
The concrete sector is known for its significant contribution to the CO2 emissions. There are two main contributing factors for this situation: the large amount of concrete consumed per year on the planet and the high CO2 released from Portland cement manufacture, the key binding agent in concrete. To face the consequent sustainability issues, diverse strategies have been explored on the carbon capture and storage potential of cementitious materials. This paper addresses the potential of storing CO2 in concrete during the curing stage, applied to the precast Portuguese industry. To this purpose, it was assumed that CO2 will become a waste that will require an outlet in the future, considering that carbon capture will become mandatory in many industries. This work concluded that the net benefit in terms of carbon retention is positive for the process of storing carbon in concrete during the curing stage. More specifically, it was demonstrated that the additional emissions from the introduction of this new operation are only 10% of the stored amount, returning a storage potential of 76 000 tonnes of CO2 yearly. Moreover, the overall net reduction in the concrete life cycle averages 9.4% and 8.8% for precast elements and only non-structural elements, respectively. When a low cement dosage strategy is coupled with carbonation curing technology, the overall carbon net reduction is estimated to be 45%.
Keywords
carbon capture utilization and storage; precast concrete industry; CO2 uptake; carbonation curing; Monte Carlo simulation
Subject
Engineering, Architecture, Building and Construction
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
