CA54 - Carbon Capture
The world's largest carbon capture, the value of carbon, Mass Timber Group, and more.
NEWSWORTHY
THE SPONSOR
Thanks to The MTimber Group for generously supporting this issue.
Get a 20% discount for their upcoming Summit with the code CARBONARCHITECT.
THE TOPIC
The recent news that the world's largest carbon capture plant opened in Iceland got me thinking about architecture.
The new facility uses massive fans to suck air into a collector with a filter material inside.
It’s a huge operation and one that is supposed to ramp up to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton capacity by 2050.
WOW! That’s a lot of effort to capture carbon.
What this tells me is that the value of carbon reduction is increasing.
Climeworks Orca plant claims to be sequestering carbon at a rate of $1000/tonne with hopes of getting that number down to $400-600/tonne by 2030.
Either way, it’s a lot of effort and cost to remove carbon that’s already been emitted.
Side note:
This is not a pro or nay discussion about carbon capture as a technology. That’s a conversation for another day.
Either way, it shows the huge amount of value architects can bring by reducing those emissions before they are ever emitted.
EXAMPLE
Let’s take a look at a simple example.
Suppose you have a 4,500m2 3-story building.
15 meters tall, 1,500m2 per floor.
A rectangular shape. 30m x 50m.
2 levels of underground parking.
How much carbon could you save by making some tweaks to the design?
PARKING REDUCTION
Using EHDD’s EPIC tool (recently released for Canada) let’s look at below grade parking.
A 4,500m2 building with 2 levels of underground parking would have an embodied carbon footprint of ~ 1,930 tonnes of CO2e.
Reduce that underground parking by a single level? Down to ~1,160 tonnes of CO2e.
That’s a reduction of 770 tonnes of carbon or $770k based on a $1,000/tonne rate.
Not to mention the amount of cost you just saved!
ENVELOPE
The envelope has a total area of 2,400m2.
Using the 2050 Materials Embodied Carbon Optimizer let’s compare two facade systems.
We could see a reduction of 121 kgCO2/m2 or a total 290 Tonnes.
At the going rate of $1,000/tonne that’s almost $300k!
Type 1 - High Carbon
Type 2 - Low Carbon
This isn’t the calculation that’s going on in the industry right now, but it does put into perspective the amount of impact we can have.
If organizations are investing huge money to remove carbon at a rate of $1,000/tonne, then there is a big value proposition coming quickly.
Buildings have a huge impact, and they can have a huge impact for good if we can focus on finding those areas to reduce.
THE PERSON
Nic Wilson is a founder and CEO of the Mass Timber Group and is passionate about seeing the adoption of Mass Timber in the building industry. He has a long history in the wood industry and is taking the knowledge and sharing it with the industry. He is a co-host on the Mass Timber Group Show podcast and posts regularly about the industry on LinkedIn.
THE PROJECT
The Stephen Taylor Court by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios is a post-secondary and student residence in the UK that achieved Passivhaus and an impressive 100-year design life. The The project uses a ground and air sourced heat pump as well as a CLT structural frame.