Welcome to Engineering with
Rosie. I am here today on the campus of the University of
Newcastle where Mineral Carbonation International have
their pilot plant facility. Mineral Carbonation
International are a company that's doing carbon capture and
utilization and I recently made a video on a broad range of
technologies that you can use to take CO2 that has been captured
from the atmosphere or from like flue gases and turn it into a
useful product. In that video, I talked about how I thought that
to assess the viability of a CCU technology, it needed to be
three things. It needed to be economic, it needed to be
durable, and it needs to be scalable. And in that video I
went through a lot of like really trendy CCU things like
making diamonds or alcohol. But none of those really ticked all
the boxes, especially the scalability one but mineral
carbonation was one of a couple of processes where I really did
see the potential for a large scale, a large amount of tonnes
of CO2 that could be taken permanently out of the
atmosphere. So I'm really excited to be here at MCi, I'm
gonna take a look at their pilot plant, get explanations of how
their product work and have a look at some of their pilot
manufacturing facilities and hear about their plans for scale
up into the future. Mineral carbonation involves
reacting carbon dioxide as a gas with minerals that contain
calcium or magnesium to permanently convert the CO2 into
a solid calcium or magnesium carbonate products. There's a
range of minerals that are suitable for the process
including naturally occurring magnesium silicates and
industrial byproducts such as steelmaking slags. The
steelmaking slags are attractive because they present in a
location that is also a source of CO2, and there's a ready
access to product markets. What's really exciting about the
natural minerals is that they're available in massive quantities,
there's actually more of these minerals available than there is
CO2. So in terms of the quantities of materials
available, there is a massive potential for CO2 abatement with
mineral carbonation. It's the acceleration of a natural
process, so these minerals react naturally with CO2. In the
environment, this takes millions of years and we've developed a
technology that scales that up to happen in minutes. And so
it's useful as an industrial process. Process starts with the
feedstock for material. So as I mentioned, it's a source of
calcium or magnesium. So that could be natural minerals like
this rock, which is called serpentinite, it's a magnesium
silicate rock. It can also the industrial byproducts, such as
steelmaking slag, that contain calcium. Our process takes those
feedstocks and then puts it through a pre-processing step
that enhances their reactivity with CO2. So that includes
grinding the mineral into a powder, in some cases involves
thermal treatment and that improves the reactivity of the
mineral. That technology can use either concentrated CO2 or it
can also use industrial flue gas direct from an industrial
process without prior concentration. So that's one of
the big advantages of MCi's technology. What we've studied
is the economics of the process at different CO2 concentrations.
And what we find that if the CO2 concentration is above 15%, then
it's more economical to directly capture the flue gas with MCi's
technology. If it's more dilute, then there's obviously a lot of
other technologies that are available that can pre
concentrate the CO2. So it's technically possible to capture
it down to about 5% CO2 but economically about 15% is the
cutover point and MCi has developed a proprietary process
where this carbonation reaction happens at low pressure using
the flue gas and also at low temperature which is really
important for minimizing the capital cost of the equipment
and the energy consumption of the process. This is serpentinite? to extract another mineral. We
then grind those materials into a powder and then combine that
powder with water to make a slurry. And then that slurry is
contacted with CO2 in MCi's process and we produce a high
purity calcium or magnesium carbonate product powder and
amorphous silica output material. And then these outputs
can be used in a range of end products including concrete so
the silica can be used in concrete to reduce its emissions
intensity. And the magnesium carbonate can be used in
plasterboards to make a low emissions plasterboard
containing up to 50% CO2 by mass. So it's actually a carbon
negative construction we can displace between 20 and 30% of
the cement content in the concrete is similar to
conventional SCM such as fly ash. That's obviously really
exciting because we're abating CO2 to produce that material and
then that material is reducing the emissions footprint further
in its application. The way that we envisage our business model
working is that as we scale up through the intermediate stages,
we'll be able to sell the products to make profit in
useful materials. As we scale up to really large scales, we think
that it could be profitable just that we can reduce the costs
efficiently, that it would be viable just based on CO2 pricing
alone. So with enough economies of scale, we think we can get
the unit cost low enough. And as we talked to, we're working with
a range of potential customers of our products as we talk to
them were continuously uncovering new applications for
the materials, some of the applications are things that we
never envisaged, for example, you know, as a filler in carpet
backing. You might not know that the carpets that are used in
office buildings contain a lot of calcium carbonate as part of
the as a filler. And that's a natural use for our material
where we could be replacing mined calcium carbonate with
something that's actually locking away CO2. What are some of the other
applications that people are talking to you about? So some of the other
applications include refractories, materials that are
used in high temperature processes, glassmaking, other
additives at different stages of the cement manufacturing
process, fire retardant materials for firefighting or
adding into construction products to improve their fire
performance, so there's a wide range of different applications.
Today, we're at our pilot plant facility at the Newcastle
Institute for Energy and Resources. What we have here is
a combination of small scale lab equipment, and also a small
continuous pilot plant, which is like a mini industrial facility
for demonstrating the technology. In front of us is a
series of small scale reactors that we use for characterizing
different potential feedstock materials. So we'll be
conducting your reaction under different process conditions to
find the optimum conditions for treating a particular sample. So
in this step, we have a slurry of the mineral powder, we're
injecting CO2 into the reactors and monitoring the CO2 uptake
over time. So inside the reactor, it's a stirred vessel
with an impeller which is agitating the slurry just in
here, the associated equipment is supplying a controlled flow
rate and composition of simulated flue gas into the
vessel. We also have control of pressure and temperature so
tightly controlling the reaction conditions and then we're taking
samples of the slurry which is inside the reactor and analyzing
that to track the reaction progress. So, you take the slurry, you
stir it, you- -inject the CO2. CO2 is absorbed
into the liquid and reacts with the mineral, comes out as a
slurry and then we filter, filter that and and dry the end
product. So how much energy does it use? Carbonation is a
thermodynamically favored process. That means that the
overall process actually releases energy in the form of
heat. But we do need to put energy in order to speed up the
process to be industrially useful. So the main energy
consuming steps are for grinding the rock and any handling of the
gas that are compressing or blowing the CO2 through the
system. Typically, even if we were using fossil fuel derived
energy for powering our process, we'd be around 80 to 90%
efficient in terms of the overall CO2 removal. Obviously,
it's improved further if you're using a low emissions, energy
source These equipments are obviously
really small scale, and we're using that for characterizing
the reactivity of the materials. What we have at the back of the
building is a small scale, continuous process. So it's like
a mini industrial process where we're putting through up to
about 100 kilograms per day of mineral in a continuous reactor.
So we're continuously pumping the slurry and reacting the CO2
and producing the different output materials. And we're
using this to characterize basically the engineering
performance of the process and gathering the information that
we need to further scale up the technology. Our process uses
standard equipment, agitated tanks, pumps and reactors,
there's no new novel devices that are needed to make our
process work. It's more about engineering the equipment in a
way that's best suited for our process. All standard
technologies that are used in mining or mineral extraction or
chemical process. So this process is putting
through about 100 kilograms of mineral per eight hour shift
between 20 to 30 kilograms of CO2 abatement. The moment we're
designing an industrial scale demonstration facility that will
be taking CO2 from an actual industrial process at about 1000
to 3000 tonnes per year. And we are aiming to commission that
plant around the middle of next year. We're aiming to be rolling
out our first commercial plants within around five years time
that will be at the scale of around 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per
year. And then scaling up to the million tonnes scale over the
next 10 to 15 years. We're seeing a huge interest in the
technology, both from CO2 emitters that are looking for a
solution for their CO2, and also companies that are interested in
using our output materials as low carbon embodied inputs to
their manufacturing processes. And our team is expanding
rapidly in order to meet that growth in demand. So we're
always on the lookout for bright engineers and scientists to come
and join our team at MCi. We're really fortunate in the
Newcastle region that there's so many young, bright engineers and
a lot of experience from the existing industries that we've
got here that we can leverage to help make this a reality for a
lot of the technologies that we're using have a lot in common
with existing technologies that are used in in mining or mineral
processing or chemical manufacture. So there's a lot of
skills that we can use in the new low carbon economy. Thanks so much to Mineral
Carbonation International for letting me inside their facility
and letting me film in there. It's not always easy to get
these cool cutting edge technology companies to let us
actually physically see what you're doing. So I really
appreciate the access and answering all my questions. I
think that the most important thing to know is the scale of
time that they have been working on this technology you might
have seen recently I did a video on Boston Metal where I went
through their technology development process, it's going
to take about 20 years from that first scientific discovery
through to an actual meaningful volume of their product being
sold and you know, displacing "dirty" steel in the market. And
Mineral Carbonation International, it's a really
similar timeframe, it's been about 10 years since they have
been funded, will be about another 10 years until we're
seeing hundreds of thousands or millions of tonnes of their
product. And that's the scale that we need to make a
meaningful difference to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
One of the other thing I really like about this company and one
of the reasons why I came up here to Newcastle region was
that it's a big coal mining region, a big coal export port,
and actually the facility next door is working on some research
related to coking coal. I think it's really interesting that you
don't hear a lot of talk in the energy transition about jobs. In
Australia, at least, the debate about phasing out coal is very
much tied to jobs in the coal industry. But MCi are scaling up
and they're looking for engineers and scientists and the
type of people that they need, the experience that they need
comes straight out of the mining industry. Their processes or
their equipment, it's really similar stuff from mining and
processing of minerals. So I think that that's really
interesting that the energy transition and solutions to
climate change. It doesn't need to be a trade off money and jobs
and sacrificing these old industries. There are plenty of
companies like this that are really keen to get those skills
that people have developed in the mining industry and then
apply them to these new technologies. So to me that's
really, really exciting. And you say heaps or it over this
region. Thanks to Mineral Carbonation International for
giving me this great tour and interview. As always, thank you
to my Patreon team who support the channel. If you'd like to
join us, I'll put a link in the description and thanks to you
all for watching. I'll see you in the next video!
