"A Huge City Polluter? Buildings. Here’s a Surprising Fix."

"Carbon capture might not work for all buildings. But some are giving it a try."

"On cold mornings in New York City, boilers in the basements of thousands of buildings kick on, burning natural gas or oil to provide heat for the people upstairs. Carbon dioxide from these boilers wafts up chimneys and into the air, one of the city’s biggest sources of global warming emissions.

But there is one exception.

At the Grand Tier, a 30-story apartment tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the carbon dioxide from its two giant gas boilers is captured, cooled to a liquid and then trucked to a concrete factory in Brooklyn. There, the carbon is mixed with cement and sealed into concrete blocks, where it can’t heat the atmosphere.

“This is the first carbon capture system on a building that we’re aware of anywhere in the world,” said Brian Asparro, the chief operating officer of CarbonQuest, the company behind the system. “And we expect that it won’t be the last.”"

Brad Plumer reports for the New York Times with photographs by Hiroko Masuike March 10, 2023.

Source: NYTimes, 03/13/2023