Determination of the CO2 Uptake of Construction Products Manufactured by Mineral Carbonation

Abstract

Mineral carbonation is a technology for capturing and storing CO2 in solid minerals. When mineral carbonation is used to produce construction materials, the quantification of the CO2 uptake of these products is of the utmost importance, as it is used to calculate the CO2 footprint of the product and/or carbon offset. The CO2 uptake is generally determined by measuring the CO2 content of a material before and after accelerated carbonation. This approach, however, does not take hydration and dehydroxylation reactions into account that may occur during carbonation, and it can therefore under- or overestimate the CO2 uptake. Thus, a more accurate and practical method to determine CO2 uptake, which also accounts for hydration and dehydroxylation reactions, is proposed in this paper. This method is based on analytical methods to determine the dry mass and the CO2 content of the solid products before and after carbonation, and on the calculation of the CO2 uptake by the following equation: CO2 uptake (wt.%) = CO2 carbonated (wt.%) × (weight after carbonation (g)/weight before carbonation (g) − CO2 initial (wt.%), with CO2 carbonated being the CO2 content in g/100 g dried carbonated material, and CO2 initial being the CO2 content in g/100 g dried initial material, i.e., before carbonation. The “weight before carbonation” is the dry weight of the initial material, and the “weight after carbonation” is the product’s dry weight after carbonation. In this paper, we show that up to 44% under- or overestimation of CO2 uptake can occur when hydration and dehydroxylation reactions are not taken into account during mineral carbonation.