High-Performance, Carbon-Negative Cement from Agricultural Waste
Researchers at Penn State are developing carbon-negative concrete by repurposing waste materials and agricultural by-products like rice hulls, corn husks, and wheat straw. Their approach involves carbonating these materials to store CO₂ directly in the cement matrix, creating a new type of concrete—“GEOC concrete”—that matches or exceeds the strength of traditional cement-based formulations. By integrating AI and novel mineralization methods, the team aims to drastically reduce the carbon footprint of concrete, which currently accounts for about 8% of global CO₂ emissions, without compromising performance. This work demonstrates how innovative material design can simultaneously advance sustainability and structural integrity in construction.
Transcript
00:00:02 worldwide humans produce about 35 billion tons of concrete every year and the way that concrete has been produced for the good part of the 20th century and beyond um results on uh a lot of CO2 emission to put that into numbers it's about 8% of all Global CO2 emissions so our work specifically focuses on using waste concrete or waste materials carbonating them so storing CO2 back
00:00:32 into the material and then putting that back into concrete so you can then use the material again put more CO2 back in it etc etc until you have a carbon negative Planet hopefully we need concrete and more broadly we need construction materials to maintain the quality of life that we enjoy and to raise people's access and standard of living we can't think about the built
00:00:57 environment without building materials cement is just the paste material and then there's mortar which is that paste plus sand and then concrete is the the plethora it's all of them it's cement plus sand plus some type of aggregate I am specifically looking at that cement section I look at agricultural products such as rice haul or corn husk or wheat straw I'm working to produce a new
00:01:29 concrete called called carbon negative geoc concrete a type of concrete which is the same strengths or even higher strengths than the traditional cement based concrete Penn State has been a Pioneer in concrete research for many years the climate impact has given us a new passion to drastically decarbonized concrete without lowering its quality
00:01:57 and performance to harness the power of AI and to capture a mineralized CO2 in ways that have never been done before we want to physically reduce the CO2 emissions in the concrete industry we have a contract to actually attach to Penn State boilers and like sequester from there you can't do that like anywhere else so the fact that it's possible at Penn State is just amazing