A Penn State doctoral student has built a carbon capture system that pulls CO2 from a bakery's boiler flue gas and turns it into materials for concrete. The system uses basalt fines and a high-energy crushing process to mineralize the captured CO2 into calcium carbonate, which can replace some traditional cement. It will start operating at the Penn State Bakery this fall. This approach tackles two sources of emissions: the CO2 from the combustion process and the CO2 released during cement production. The student has filed a patent and co-founded a startup called Distributed Materials to scale the technology. The project is a practical test of carbon mineralization outside the lab.
