To minimize the rate of CO2 molecules released into the atmosphere it is critical to identify and deploy the cheapest and the most economically and environmentally attractive technologies. The deployment of capture and sequestration technologies that only involve cost for every ton of CO2 captured will be a significant burden to society and therefore are likely not sustainable. Calera believes that environmental sustainability can be and should be coupled with economic sustainability and has focused on clean technologies that are also compelling stand alone economic business cases. This is true for both of Calera’s core technologies: the conversion of CO2 into beneficial reuse products and more energy efficient production of industrial chemicals.
Calera has been developing a CO2 conversion to materials technology that both captures and sequesters CO2 as well as provides a sustainable economic case. Using this technology it is possible to produce construction materials that are “green” but also have superior performance such as weight and strength over currently available construction materials. Because of the ability to generate reactive calcium carbonates with unique properties, Calera’s CO2 mineralization process is one of those rare technologies where the business models exists today to make CO2 sequestration commercially attractive in certain applications. In these cases the economic feasibility is underpinned not by the price of CO2 but by the actual sale of better products that also contain sequestered CO2. Calera is currently focused on regions, feedstocks and product markets where the business case works today and plans to continue to expand the technology applications to more and more CO2 capture situations and broader scale as the technology matures.
Calera’s second core technology, which is an adaptation of Calera’s Alkalinity Based on Low Energy (ABLE) Process, combines electrochemistry and catalysis processes to produce lower energy commodity chemicals. In addition to producing chemicals that can be used to capture CO2 in large quantities, the ABLE technology also produces other chemicals that have large existing commodity markets. Since the energy required to manufacture these chemicals using the Calera ABLE technology is significantly reduced as compared to the currently available technology, it lowers the cost and CO2 associated with producing these chemicals. Again this technology meets the criteria for being environmentally and economically sustainable. |
