One of our more frequent subjects, Calera, was back in the news recently, graduating from press releases and blogs like this one to The New York Times. Calera’s process is starting to get a lot of attention in spite of continued skepticism. The attention is more than warranted if Calera can live up to its claims of recovering 86% of CO2 from power plant (or cement plant) exhaust and converting it to a viable building material. Potentially solving two carbon problems with one process is a game changer.
Calera is thinking differently about the problem. Rather than the conventional wisdom of the green lobby that says we need to scrap everything and build a complete new energy infrastructure, they believe that the existing energy can be made as clean or cleaner than renewables. This kind of thinking is needed, even if it doesn’t lead to commercially viable products, because without it, we will never make the leaps needed to solve the most important challenges of our times.