Buckle in. This challenge involves a lot of new terminology, but all of it is simple in isolation. Your pair will answer any questions, you can Google, you can ask ChatGPT, you can phone a friend. Remember to breathe.
You’re going to build and deploy a lambda function that calculates the specific heat consumption of a cement plant.
This is a cement kiln. It’s a big metal tube. We use this to make cement. Making cement accounts for 8% of all human carbon emissions.
Rocks, mostly limestone and silica, go in one end, and get cooked with fuel, mostly coal.
Clinker comes out the other end. We grind clinker up to make cement.
Clinker is just boring little grey rocks.
Clinker is just rocks, but chemically different from the rocks we started with.
Clinker is special ✨reactive✨rocks, while normal rocks are famously unreactive.
Limestone (CaCO3) goes in one end of the kiln, with some other junk (sand, shale, clay, fly ash, iron ore). This mix of rocks is called raw meal.
In the cement plant, the raw meal gets heated up to about 1400 Celsius until the carbon is released as CO₂ (which is bad).
If you take limestone (CaCO3), and subtract CO2, you get left with calcium oxide (CaO). The hot CaO reacts with the other junk to form silicates that cool to make clinker.
About half of the emissions from cement come from this chemical reaction, the other half come from burning the fuel.
Making 1000 tons of clinker produces about 800kg of CO2.
Carbon Re saves carbon by helping cement plants to reduce the amount of fuel they burn.