China cement factory has shown that it’s able to capture much of its own carbon dioxide. If the approach were to become widespread, it could have a significant impact, since cement production is responsible for more than 5 percent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

      When the cement plant works,we have used waste heat to drive a process called amine scrubbing that, at test scales, removed between 30 and 40 percent of the total emissions from the plant’s flue gases.

  “We think we are the first project that is testing technology in real cement-plant conditions,” said Liv-Margrethe Bjerge, project manager for the test at Norcem, which owns the Brevik plant. “It’s the only cement project doing post-combustion capture.”

     Bjerge spoke in Austin, Texas, at the largest international conference on carbon capture and sequestration technologies.