"The 5bn tonnes of cement produced each year thus account for some 8% of the world’s anthropogenic CO2, and generate abnormally high emissions per dollar of revenue earned compared even with other polluting industries (see chart). Yet if less than 0.1% by weight of graphene is added to the mixture, concrete ends up 30% stronger. And stronger concrete means less of it is needed, with a consequent reduction in CO2. "
The question is does it shed nanographite or other nano-carbon particles and if so, at what level. Of course, open fires and photocopiers produce these particles as well so there is some level of background exposure that appears to be somewhat "safe". I expect the "no such thing as safe" crowd will be out if they sniff the opportunity for a witch hunt or 10 [1]
I did some IT work at a business that also was a training company for a long time and during renovations I had a desk between a server closet (like small room packed with servers hosting web sites) with no door on it and a massive "bizhub" style copier that was running constantly making training binders for the training business (yes, this was a while ago). My hearing was just shot at the end of each day and I was inhaling so much gunk from the printer that it was like living in a major city with a smog problem (as in stuff was coating the inside of my nose, my skin, etc). It took me a while to realize what was going on and I moved a few doors down to some older office space we had in the back of another business in the same strip of office spaces (this place had an ant infestation and no AC but at least I could breath again). It was a real eye opener in terms of noise/crud.
Even non-reactive particles like asbestos can cause a persistent inflammatory response eventually leading to cancer, chronic fatigue, malaise, etc. The ones that get the most attention these days are PM-2.5: tiny particles or droplets in the air that are two and one half microns or less in width, penetrate alveoli, and go straight into your blood stream.
In about a decade or two brake dust pollution will be more recognized as a severe public health problem. It's not on the hype cycle yet. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32593898/
Mechanism of DNA methylation and histone modification alterations induced by nanomaterials and nanoparticles:
Exposure to NMs and NPs alters the functioning of chromatin-modifying proteins, e.g., DNA methylation and demethylation machinery, and histone-modifying enzymes, causing changes in the pattern of DNA methylation and histone modifications.
One of the most common effects of NMs and NPs is the induction of cellular stress, e.g., oxidative and endoplasmic reticulum stress, and metabolic disturbances, e.g., one-carbon metabolism and the citric acid cycle.
These events are causing DNA damage and repair response and metabolic alterations affecting the functioning of chromatin-modifying enzymes.
Any or all of these events may result in hypomethylation of DNA and altered histone modification patterns.
Additionally, exposure to NMs and NPs causes activation of the inflammatory response that, in turn, may cause DNA hypermethylation and histone modification changes
Benzene and similar flat aromatic carbon-based compounds are mutagenetic (cancer- and birth defect- causing) because they can slip between base pairs in DNA and disrupt replication.
I wonder whether graphene, itself a flat carbon compound, has the same affinity for DNA?
You'd think, but in fact biochemistry is quite bad at disposing of pure carbon compounds. You can test this: stick a pencil lead into some compost for a week and pull it out.
I still have a piece of pencil lead stuck in my finger from 24 years ago, though it has gotten smaller. And I know someone with a piece more than twice that old.
Because if I do not use my photocopier it does not emit anything, it just emit things during usage.
In contrast I do not "use" my wall. It maybe emits things when it is newly made, but otherwise it does not emit things.
The same arguments was true for asbestos as well. Asbestos building materials are totally harmless if left undisturbed. But eventually that wall will have to be be repainted/sanded/drilled into/knocked down.
It's would be golden if we could remove a great deal of the CO2 produced regardless of whether graphene was present in the mix. Or, hear me out, devise a concrete that reacted with atmospheric co2 to produce something more benign. That way it changes from an emitter to being a passive remover.
Poured concrete actually is a passive remover! The issue is the process of baking carbonate rocks at high temperatures to form the cement. This not only takes a lot of energy, but it inherently drives off CO2 from the rock. Over the decades as concrete slowly gets stronger and stronger it absorbs back a small but substantial fraction of the CO2 it emitted.
The way to make this better is to be able to have mixes with lower fractions of cement for a similar level of strength - hence using graphene in this case.
I found out the hard way that the older concrete gets, the stronger it gets.
Was trying to make a 30cm x 60cm hole in a DIY concrete wall that the last owner of my house had placed over the mains pipe that was leaking from two joints underneath it (I suspect he also DIYed the piping, given its rather unorthodox setup). I had to make room for a plumber to access it.
It was poured in the early 70s, looked pretty, well, homemade, so I figured, easy! Borrowed a concrete breaker, got to it.
3 weeks, very painful wrists from the vibration, and a hired concrete saw, later, I finished my hole.
But holy crap, I had vastly underestimated concrete.
It takes about 40 years for concrete to reach about max strength. I've also experienced the fun of it having lived in a concrete building from the 70s :)
Couldn't this be addressed best by driving the heat on green energy and directly siphoning off the produced CO2 into either underground capture or even green fuels?
I'm still a bit at loss why Climeworks or Prometheus Fuels would pump ginormous amounts of normal air through their respective setups to extract the 0,0004% of CO2 instead of feeding from pure CO2 by industrial processes like this one.
CO2 was actually too expensive for enhanced oil recovery for which it is often used since in many cases capturing it in an effective way from industry is just not possible or nowhere near economically viable even at high prices. Hence trump signed a subsidy for co2 sequestration to fight the climate change he didn't believe in.
Since pumping CO2 into the ground is technically just that (even if they don't really care much whether it actually stays there and oil comes out in the process).
Generally the solution to these problems whether it's co2 capture or power to gas at scale is not some future way to defy physics or edge our way up in efficiency towards a distant future where it might be viable but to just emit less. I suspect we'll look at this in the future the same way many look at the plastics industry's takes and propaganda about recycling.
Maybe the solution is dense, high rise concrete buildings surrounded by woodland. The size of the woodland being determined by the net emissions from the concrete.
I might even prefer that to living in suburbia if you also added room for commercial zoning.
I think the way we designed cities around cars could really stand a serious second look. Cars are really a necessary evil for me. I just bought one after 6 years of not having a car. I wish I didn't need it.
I hear that. We can put bike lanes and a tram track beside the building, shops and amenities at the bottom, and room for food trucks to come and go. It'll be perfect.
More seriously, sorry to hear about the car. It sucks to be that way. I've always been lucky enough to arrange my life around access to public transport (I don't drive) but I've been tempted many, many times.
> Or, hear me out, devise a concrete that reacted with atmospheric co2 to produce something more benign. That way it changes from an emitter to being a passive remover
Good propertyy. It would be even better if the material acted as a good insulator. And be re- or upcyclabe when we need to tear down the building. And while we're at it: it would be nice if the product would just grow...
Geopolymer concrete pretty much fits the bill for this. From my layman’s understanding the main reason we don’t use geopolymers instead of Portland cement is because we already have so much infrastructure for Portland cement
This is a dream scenario, but something a bit more achievable...I would like to see more buildings designed with a longer design life, so we don't have to pour concrete on the same block multiple times a century. I wonder if current emissions calcs for "Green" buildings include demolition and reconstruction when they are past their use-by date.
The "Glulam versus steel" section is really interesting!
> A 2002 case study comparing energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and costs for roof beams found it takes two to three times more energy and six to twelve times more fossil fuels to manufacture steel beams than it does to manufacture glulam beams. It compared two options for a roof structure of a new airport in Oslo, Norway: steel beams, and glulam spruce wood beams. The life cycle greenhouse gas emission is lower for the glulam beams. If they are burned at the end of their service life, more energy can be recovered than was used to manufacture them. If they are landfilled, the glulam beams are a worse alternative than steel because of the methane emission.[9] A more recent study by Chalmers University of Technology was not so optimistic. Nevertheless, it showed that while the absolute greenhouse emissions are strongly dependent on the method used to calculate them, the environmental profile of glulam is typically as good as or better than steel in an example structural application.[10] The cost of the glulam beams is slightly lower than the steel beams.
I'm also curious about the flammability. I did some Googling and wasn't able to find a concise answer. It seems like the beams themselves can be fireproofed with a non-wood cladding, or another study said they can be over-specced to give a 1 hour fire resistance rating. Another study said that steel connectors are typically used, and cladding for the wood-steel connection is an unresolved issue.
It seems like people are using them, so I presume it's safe. I don't think I would want to live in them until we've seen a bunch of them catch on fire. I'd probably be fine with it up to 3 stores, but anything higher would make me concerned.
30% stronger might mean considerably more savings than 30% by weight, especially if the graphene concrete has better properties under tension (where concrete is abysmal). Stronger materials can have a larger volume to surface area ratio safely, picture an X shaped pillar rather than a full cylinder.
I read this as less concrete used for any one application. It's also not clear to me that this would reduce net costs, as producing bulk graphene is likely not as cheap as any other conceivable additive. From an environmental perspective, if required volume is reduced but cost is the same, then worldwide consumption could be reduced.
Graphene flakes are all that is needed for concrete reinforcement, and it's trivial to produce, even at scale. Carbon chunks are thrown into industrial blenders with water and detergent, resulting in graphene flakes sheared and then separated in suspension. The flakes are separated, washed, and dried.
Large graphene sheets are hard. Tiny flakes are trivial, gradeschool kitchen science.
For it to come into effect, the cost of the concrete should be a major part of its usage. This may or may not be true in this case, since there's land costs and a lot of regulations
I'm not an expert but is that true? Road bridges are commonly concrete. In this application they use tensioned steel inside the concrete to help with the tension and other forces.
Yeah exactly. The steel resists the tensile forces and the concrete resists the compressive forces.
Concrete is very weak in tension. That's why it's basically never used without steel reinforcement. I think increasing the tensile strength is mainly useful to prevent cracking which looks bad and can allow water to get to the steel.
Graphene's cousin, carbon nanotubes, have been touted as a concrete-strengthening additive for some time now[1], but the downside seems to be that corrosion sensitivity is increased.[2] Curious to see whether graphene would really be immune to that as is claimed.
"And when, eventually, these things do reach the ends of their lives, if the graphene can be recovered and used again it would be a welcome boost to building a circular economy."
I swear these stories are like clockwork. Hey it's been six months, let's crank out another story about how graphene has finally made it as if we haven't heard that before. Put it on the garbage pile with the incredible battery breakthrough and the hey guys did you know Bitcoin went up/down again? articles.
I especially enjoy how this ties one of the most expensive products by weight (graphene) to one of the least (concrete). There is no greater tease for investors than suggesting that your knew tech might one day be an ingredient in concrete or steel.
According to the article, an 0.1% by-weight addition of concrete reduces the need for concrete by about 30%. (Extrapolating a little, based on the 30% strength increase, may not be exact.)
So each gram of graphene reduces about 300 grams of concrete.
Concrete looks like it costs about 5-10c per kilo.
Graphene costs around $200 per kilo.
So yeah, we're about an order of magnitude off, even if some of my numbers above aren't precise. It will either require a large price fall in graphene, or serious carbon taxes on concrete.
Reduces the need for structural concrete by about 30%. Graphene makes the concrete stronger. That is important but not the entire purpose of concrete. Lots is used as space filler, liquid rock to seal against wind/rain/snow. Concrete is also used because it is heavy. Making it stronger won't reduce its use as a heavy anchor point for a structure. A giant wind turbine needs more than a strong base, but a literally massive one to prevent tipping over in strong winds. Graphene infused or not, that base still needs to weight the same.
That's a very good point and it can go both ways. There may be some use cases that currently are not acceptable for concrete due to its bulk but if reduced by 30% it becomes viable. I haven't read the archive link yet but if this also extends the life of concrete and reduces maintenance costs, that's a win too.
I know it's popular to be a millennial on HN and demand instant gratification of our short attention spans. But 20 years really is nothing for developments like this.
The article actually mentions a company called Levidian. Apparently, they produce thousands of tonnes of graphene per year already. I'm sure they are not the only one. Somebody is buying that stuff and using it for something. A core usecase for this company seems to be carbon capture. The founders of this company were involved with the ground breaking research that lead to discovering how to produce graphene.
Also, that's less than 20 years ago. They were messing around with sticky tape and graphite in 2004. The people that did that got their Nobel price in 2010. From there to thousands of tonnes produced per year in the space of 18 years is actually kind of impressive.
> I know it's popular to be a millennial on HN and demand instant gratification of our short attention spans. But 20 years really is nothing for developments like this.
> Also, that's less than 20 years ago. They were messing around with sticky tape and graphite in 2004. The people that did that got their Nobel price in 2010. From there to thousands of tonnes produced per year in the space of 18 years is actually kind of impressive.
If anything, it's a pre-millennial attitude - the 20th century was the era when people got used to astonishing advances every few years, and the space race was preeminent in this.
1957: Sputnik 1
1969: Moon landing
1981: Space shuttle
1986: Mir space station
To a layman who has seen the above, 20 years to develop a space elevator sounds perfectly reasonable and even conservative.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", a 1968 book, was set in 1992, and featured sentient androids hardly distinguishable from humans and off-world colonies in (presumably) different star systems. So yeah, 20 years to build a space elevator is, indeed, a very conservative estimate by the standards of 1960-1990s.
Likewise, there aren't that many works of fiction that deal with anarchist societies and they are always fascinating to me. In hindsight, perhaps the endless descriptions of the landscape would be more entertaining if I'd tried to hand-draw a map from the descriptions. Well, I haven't read Blue Mars yet.
i found almost every part simultaneously both. absolutely agree about the politics, revolutions, the trans-nats politics, i even loved Ann's geology/rocks stuff as i'm a climber and enjoying looking at rocks myself.
to me, the hilariously boring part was the convention where they deliberated over the constitution. too accurate. also the constant repetition of people getting lost in the wilderness and having a vision of Hiroko...
it took me almost a year and a half of quitting blue mars before i finally finished. he just really needed a more judicious editor.
hah, just noticed your username. i put off dune forever until finally watching the movie... half way through god emperor now. i think the politics and philosophy of dune are even more interesting than mars, though obviously different in scope/plausibility.
> also the constant repetition of people getting lost in the wilderness and having a vision of Hiroko [...] really needed a more judicious editor
Agreed. I also took some time to go through all the books and did it in the end partly out of a sense of duty.
> hah, just noticed your username
:D Initially it was meant to be a throwaway account, but I didn't want to go with the usual throwaway1234 pattern that is common on hn.
> the politics and philosophy of dune are even more interesting than mars, though obviously different in scope/plausibility.
Also agreed. It's not easy for me to say which of the two conveys more insight into the human condition and human societies. Dune is certainly grander and bolder in vision, with lots of surprising speculation. Otoh, Mars credibly captures the anarchic dynamics that would arise were we to ever actually colonize the planet.
In the end they both have something to offer, though for me Dune remains the greater series.
I first tried to read this over a decade ago and at the time (first chapter or so) I had the overwhelming impression that the book was based on cold-war era fear mongering.
I didn't continue. If that isn't the case I will gladly try again.
Serious question, and I hope someone could help me: I am going through a restoration work next year (2023) which involves concrete and a very delicate environment (city of Venezia, Italy), and would love to try to use graphene to strengthen the concrete. Quantities are not huge, so cost would not be a big issue for this particular project.
What would be the best way to experiment with it, other than contacting Levidian Nanosystems and/or Dr. Tour and ask them?
My father worked for the last few years in a company specialized in graphene technology and products. It's wrong for me to say this but I ended up not thinking much of it. The company pivoted many times trying to find a successful product. Their strategy seems to be "throw graphene at anything and hope for the best". As it worst it has used very dubious claims and armies of sales people to peddle their products.
Such a shame graphene didn't blow up like it was hyped to. I remember hearing it was going to be the new laser. That's probably too extreme, but i wonder if it's just a material that we discovered "too soon" and quickly it will have tons of applications.
The radioactivity of uranium was discovered in 1896, and it took nearly 50 years to make its killer app. But it sure made an explosive debut (sorry Japan). Chemistry and materials engineering just takes longer than software dev.
Developments in the physical world take longer than in software. A lot of things are overhyped because people don’t understand the difference between a controlled experiment and a finished industrial product. But it’s not because the hype decreases that we won’t find uses in the future. So yeah, graphite was overhyped, pretty much like high temperature superconductors or other scientific fads of the last 50-odd years. This does not mean that we will never get anything useful out of this (high temperature superconductors found some use cases about 40 years after they were cool and new; there are many other examples).
It's a discovery that was hyped way too early and way too widely in order to drive research grants. I hope this behavior stops but unless incentives change it will likely only increase.
Studied photonics/laser physics in college, and my understanding is that lasers took a long time before being useful also. Only with the advent of laser diodes did they really take off for digital media and communications.
I hope they will not find any nasty properties like they did with asbestos. Is it known what happens if you cut graphene and the dust gets into your lungs?
We’ve already run that experiment on millions of schoolchildren. It turns out pencils are safe. And even safer without the wood around them — those are stabby bits. The graphene layers that make up graphite seem to be pretty harmless.
There is a difference between a solid rod of something that tends to end up in someone’s mouth in the worst case scenario and small particles of the same thing that can end up in lungs.
Asbestos is just a silicate, which is also not harmful in many cases, including almost anything made of glass. The problem is the physical form, not the chemical composition or the atomic-scale structure.
Not to say that graphene is carcinogenic; I don’t know the literature. But it probably should not be dismissed out of hand purely because graphite is common.
The solid rod of the pencil is graphite, not graphene. You can make a bit of graphene from the graphite by using sticky tape, I read. I'm not sure how much graphene "pollution" would appear spontaneously when using a pencil in a normal way.
Have you never used a pencil sharpener before? Never smelled the sweet aroma of sawdust and shaved graphite? You break it up on purpose, that has to release some graphene sheets.
The parent's point was that graphene was harmless because graphite is widely used. Graphite is just a lot of graphene layers stacked on top of each other. Pretty much no dangerous particles are emitted during normal use of a pencil, which was part of the point.
But small particles surely do end up in the lungs when you're writing with a pencil, right? Certainly when you're drawing with one. Less than 100% of the graphene ends up on the paper ...
Small particles of everything end up in our lungs, the question is whether they remain there, as opposed to break down or get decomposed, and whether they cause any harm. Dose is important as well.
We can get graphene by literally peeling it off graphite using a scotch tape.
> That's where Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov came in. They took a hunk of graphite and used Scotch tape to peel off layer after layer after layer. Geim and Novoselov then analyzed what they had left, and found graphene. For their discovery – which was published in 2004 – they were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
From the article: "Graphite, the common form of crystalline carbon (the rarer one being diamond) is, in essence, a lot of layers of graphene piled on top of one another." So when you write by rubbing graphite on paper you leave behind graphene on paper.
Drinking too much water can cause a fatal electrolyte imbalance in your blood. Breathing too pure of oxygen will seriously, perhaps fatally, damage your lungs. Many metals are simultaneously important in trace amounts and debilitating or fatal in larger (albeit still small) quantities.
That's just for things that you are supposed to do, only too much of. Graphene is not useful or an important part of your body's functions; doing things you aren't even supposed to be doing with it (breathing it in, for example) can only have a negative effect.
Speaking of pure carbon, carbon nanotubes are known to cause lung tumors.
Well there’s always pneumoconiosis… I’m not sure schoolchildren are cutting concrete mixed with graphene in industrial settings. Probably should take appropriate precautions.
Why not invest more time and energy into renewing old plastics? We already have an ideal material, it just needs to have a longer lifespan of use. I have no doubt graphene will be the material of the future, like plastics were when they first came out. But we have more pressing concerns.
It's just funny because because they are going to de-carbonize with something that is pure carbon ;) In a way they could also say they are going to carbonize construction... But I get it of course, today if you say you're going to use crypto, it's not the same meaning as 10 years ago. In the Netherlands we have a "Nitrogen crisis", at first one is baffled as the air is 78% Nitrogen... Turns out they mean bound Nitrogen in the soil. I guess as a purist one could also be slightly annoyed when Corona virus is used to mean Covid19 or the actual virus (SARS-CoV-2).
I guess all these example could be the basis for nerdy in-jokes. For example, because of poor naming conventions we are in the situation where the solution to THE Corona virus could be A Corona virus. Just speculating (actually less lethal strains are perhaps the solution).
