Hi Will,
Great points!
For (1), you are correct — what we wanted to simulate, is maximum possible carbonation (assuming the building is demolished and the crushed concrete is used as a CCS technology) to compare to upfront emissions. We wanted to show that carbonation would
never “reabsorb” CO2 to recover the initial emissions. For your own analyses, you could certainly find the time it would take to reach the steel rebar depth and limit your analysis to that time frame. The beauty of the model is that it is flexible and can
be used for a myriad of analyses. We just chose one to illustrate implementation.
For (2), you’re totally right; I do think that could be layered on top of the quantification of CO2 emissions vs. sequestration. Since we didn’t know if users would be using this model today or 10-20 years from now, we opted to leave the time-value-of-carbon
calculation to the specific user.
Hope this helps!
w
Wil V. Srubar III, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Colorado BoulderCivil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering Program
ECOT 441 **• **UCB 428 **• **Boulder, CO 80309