CHESHIRE west Council is considering a motion to prevent this carbon capture and storage project going ahead in a couple of days. CO2 from several peak district cement factories will have the CO2 produced during production removed and pumped out by pipeline into Morcambe Bay depleted gas fields. The cost, a mere 5 billion! Theres a lot of opposition, not sure whether just nimbyism or maybe due to cost and unproven technologies' efficacy being exagerated. Would be interested in any views on other alternatives to enable co2 from this sector being reduce.

The possible ways to decarbonise cement/concrete/lime are

1) stop using it

2) CCS

3) both of the above

In principle I'm leaning towards 1) but recognise that lots of people are still using it including me, so looks like 2) or 3) are the way we'll be going.

AIUI the Hynet project will quite rapidly fill up the redundant Douglas gas field it is being pumped into, so a different redundant gas field will be used for Peak Carbon further North near Morecambe, if either/both projects are built.

Yes, that's kind of what I meant by "stop using" conventional cement-kiln cement :-)

This one is a neat idea, but it works by using a steelmaking furnace to decompose the minerals at 1000+ degC instead of doing the same heating in a cement kiln. Same idea as GGBS.

So the supply of cementitious material is limited by how much steel your country is making (which in the UK is not much anymore). So great as a niche product or as an interim solution, but not going to fully substitute for kiln cement I fear.

Also (like GGBS) it's something of an accounting trick to call it zero emissions cement - you assign all the emissions to the steel products instead, and claim the cement is emissions free!

But yes there are a number of ideas like this to reduce use of conventional cement ("stop using it"), all helpful at nibbling away at cement kiln usage, but not looking like enough to eliminate it.

If anything the 'benefit' of the cement substitutes and CCS is they will make cement much more expensive, so then people will think longer and harder before they specify it! Does my slab really need to be 200mm think, would 80mm do instead? Does my garage floor need to be equally as strong as a bridge on HS2 or could I use a weaker mix? Etc

I think its mostly private money. I know carbon offsets are paying for some CCS.

Each time I've looked at Global cement production, the UK figures don't even register. They're simply lumped into the rest of the world figures and even then barely a blip on the landscape and have fallen in recent years. I know we import too so manufacture alone isn't the true usage story.
However, 5bn for an almost infinitesimal Global production amount, mmm the the skeptics have it right IMO.
Follow the money as they say.

So how much will a bag of cement cost.At the moment its about £7 I think

"At the moment its about £7 I think" That's outrageously cheap-as-chips. Last time I bought, it was in cwt bags (what a cwt, I hear them say).

"or sell it ... at whatever price the market will bear" Don't they always? Unless govt has courage - they mandate, not merely incentivise lead/alcohol levels in road fuel; all follow suit, so that kind is the only kind; the door is closed on that avenue of product differentiation for premium pricing, in a mature commodity market, so price remains the only competitive advantage.