Overview

 

There is a growing urgency to develop techniques to capture CO₂ emissions economically and efficiently, whilst also utilising and then capitalising on the captured CO₂ as a valuable feedstock. On the other hand, heavy industry generates massive waste that can be re-utilised as feedstock for some of these techniques, leading to waste re-valorisation. This is critical as heavy industry waste volumes are also likely to increase in the medium-long term due to a gradual depletion of high-grade ores (with consequent use of lower grades, which require additional beneficiation steps), potentially creating a major environmental problem for the mining and heavy industry sectors.

This project aims to address existing challenges with MC processes from serpentinite and alkaline waste feedstock, via exploring innovative approaches to i) reduce the energy consumption of the thermal activation process for serpentinite ores, a step that presently requires large amount of energy, and to ii) deal with presence of silica, a common feature to many feedstocks, which imposes serious limitation on the overall efficiency of current processes.