“When you build strong buildings, as an earthquake engineer would certainly be doing in Chile, and have done, you use a very angular kind of aggregate. If you use rounded pebbles, the pebbles don’t grab on the cement, and they just fall to pieces.” – Earthquake expert Roger Bilham.

(Denver, Colroado) — The earthquake that struck Chile was 500 times more powerful than the earthquake that struck Haiti, but it caused a fraction of the casualties.

AMY GOODMAN: In Chile, rescue workers are searching for survivors under the rubble following Saturday’s massive 8.8 earthquake, one of the strongest in recorded history. More than 700 people were killed, with the number expected to rise.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has announced emergency measures to deal with the destruction. She said one-and-a-half million people have been affected by the earthquake and declared a “state of catastrophe.” A curfew has been put in place in some areas.

The quake heavily damaged many of the country’s roads, airports and ports. It also triggered a tsunami that killed at least four people and caused serious damage to at least one port town.

Concepción, Chile’s second largest city, about 300 miles south of Santiago, one the hardest hit of the cities. The mayor has said food is running out and the situation is getting out of control. Thousands of people remain homeless. The army has been sent in to support local police. Security officials used tear gas and water cannons to disperse crowds who took food and supplies from a supermarket in Concepción. But according to the New York Times, law enforcement authorities, heeding the cries of residents that they lacked food and water, eventually settled on a system that allowed staples to be taken but not televisions and other electronic goods.

Even as the people of southern Chile continue to grapple with the death toll and the devastation wrought by the massive earthquake, many seismologists believe the wreckage could have been far worse. The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile early Saturday morning was 500 times more powerful than the 7.0-magnitude quake that struck Haiti on January 12th, but it caused only a fraction of the casualties in comparison with the 300,000 people estimated to have died in Haiti.

Seismologists suggest one reason for the difference in scale is that Chile enforced building codes for earthquake-resistant structures after the experience of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake fifty years ago in 1960. Earthquake expert Roger Bilham argues it is quality of building construction and not simply the strength of the tremor that poses the most danger during an earthquake. He warns some of the fastest growing cities in the global south are also those facing significant seismic hazards, and the rapid pace of haphazard construction in these cities puts some 400 million people at risk.

Bilham was among the first seismologists to visit Haiti after the earthquake and in a recent article in Nature magazine calls for the enforcement of earthquake-resistant construction guidelines. University of Colorado professor of geology and co-author with Susan Elizabeth Hough of After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet, Roger Bilham joins me now from Denver, Colorado.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! It’s very good to have you with us.

ROGER BILHAM: Good Morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger, can you start off by explaining the magnitude of the earthquake that has hit Chile and the scope of the damage?

ROGER BILHAM: Yes, a magnitude-8.8 earthquake is one of the biggest that you can have on the planet. In fact, the very largest we know about also happened in Chile in 1960, as you rightly point out. It had a magnitude of 9.5, much bigger than the one that’s just occurred. However, the death toll in Chile during that earthquake was only 1,600 people.

We may reach four figures in this earthquake, but we have to think of this as a tremendous success story. Earthquake-resistant construction prevails throughout Chile. They have an intelligent government that enforces these regulations. And they have constant reminders of what earthquakes can do. So, although a tremendous number of buildings have been damaged, the buildings are damaged to the point that people can walk out of them.

In Haiti, this did not occur. The buildings were shaken violently and completely pancaked, in many cases, because there was no earthquake resistance at all. And although Haiti has a history of earthquakes, stretching back to the same period of time — Christopher Columbus obviously arrived 1492, we don’t know about earthquakes before then — although Haiti has this extraordinary long history of earthquakes, the local government was completely unaware of the potential effects of bad building practices.

AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about bad building practices, what exactly do you mean? What did Chile have that Haiti didn’t have?

ROGER BILHAM: Well, first of all, there are various things that earthquake engineers insist on. The survival of certain critical structures, like hospitals, schools, fire stations and so on, those have to survive earthquakes intact and operate the next, you know, few minutes after the shaking has stopped. It turns out that some of these hospitals have been damaged, but probably not as many as could have.

Now, what do you do to make a building safe from earthquakes? You need good quality foundations. Most buildings now going up are known as concrete skeleton designs. They have a structure of steel embedded in concrete. And you have to make sure you have the right kind of steel. If you use brittle steel, for example, the steel will simply snap during an earthquake. What you need is ductile steel. It costs a little bit more.

In Haiti, it was all brittle steel, steel without ribbing, even, in terms of little corrugations that hold the concrete together when shaking commences. There are little structural members that look as though they’re in place simply to hold the steel in place during pouring of the cement, those things called stirrups. In fact, the stirrups used in Haiti were very weak, almost chicken wire-type strength, whereas in Chile, I’m sure, they applied the appropriate strength and thickness. And what these little pieces of metal do is stop the columns from exploding during the violent vertical shaking in an earthquake.

Then the quality of the concrete (1) matters. If you mix three parts of sand to one part of cement, which is something they’ll never tell you in school, but which most construction people know, you get good quality concrete that doesn’t fall to pieces in an earthquake. However, if you go down the beach and shovel beach sand into a wheelbarrow and take it back to your building site without washing it or without checking, you know, exactly what it’s got in it — it might have dirt or soil, or it might have salt in — you finish up with a very weak concrete (1). And it’s all too tempting, if you’re building your own house, as must have occurred frequently in Haiti, to take four parts of sand or five parts of sand, making an extremely weak concrete (1).

Another thing is the addition of aggregate. When you build strong buildings, as an earthquake engineer would certainly be doing in Chile, and have done, you use a very angular kind of aggregate. If you use rounded pebbles, the pebbles don’t grab on the cement, and they just fall to pieces.

So there are a number of very obvious things that can be done, and unfortunately, people are not told how to do this. You know, very frequently, the lowest-paid workers turn up at a construction site, and they’re told to, you know, mix some cement, follow what that man is doing over there, and assemble it. Well, if there’s an engineer on board, it gets done right. If the man does it on his own, he may well be copying incorrect practices. And as a result, Haiti has duplicated a series of catastrophic designs that are weak from the foundations up and consequently fell down.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Bilham, are there an increased number of earthquakes? I mean, this weekend you have what happened in Chile. Also, wasn’t there a small one in Pakistan? And then, of course, you had the horror in Haiti on January 12th. If you could talk about these, and beyond, in China, in Pakistan, in the past, in the United States.

ROGER BILHAM: Of course, yes. Earthquakes are happening all the time. They’ve been happening for the last several billion years on our planet, and there’s no change in their frequency. It looks like large earthquakes are happening suddenly now, a kind of conspiracy effect. No, it’s just a statistical fluctuation.

We have to worry about earthquakes that actually occur near population centers. We don’t need to worry about earthquakes that happen in the middle of the ocean. Nobody is there, just a few fish. So, what really matters is where our populations are.

And one of the most unexpected things is if you make a map of the world and plop down all the cities that you know about, the very largest of them, probably half of them, are located on plate boundaries. Plate boundaries is where earthquakes occur. Now, supposing you were coming in from a distant galaxy and you wanted to just populate the planet, you would try to avoid those places. But we have grown up on this planet, and we found that plate boundaries are in fact very desirable places to live. They’re on the seashore. There’s usually a good trading arrangement, even inland, near mountain belts, which are plate boundaries, like the Himalaya and parts of Iran, and so on. Cities are often located near sources of water, and these sources of water come out at range fronts. In other words, all the most desirable places on our planet appear to be populated by very, very large cities.

Now, if you wind the clock back 150 years, you find that these were only villages. The population of the world has increased tenfold in the repeat time of most damaging earthquakes on our planet. And so, we have set up a disaster waiting to happen in probably a hundred cities with populations more than a million people. And one could list — one could list these hundred cities, and probably two or three of these will be damaged in the next two or three decades. A completely unacceptable prediction. It should not be possible for us to say that we’re going to lose another 500,000 people. Six hundred and fifty thousand people have died from earthquakes just since 2000. That’s up almost fourfold since the previous two decades.

And you could ask, well, why is this? Well, it’s partly a statistical fluctuation in the locations of large earthquakes that are occurring, and it’s partly a recurrence of these big earthquakes to cities that were former villages only 200 years ago. We know their history of earthquakes, and we know they will have a future of earthquakes. And so, many of these cities, mostly in the developing nations, are slated for demolition by earthquakes.

And it’s — a well-known phrase is that earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do. And we are now seeing that buildings are in fact weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, it’s, to me, completely unacceptable that we should live in a world where you can shake the ground a little bit, and the building will fall down. It’s just nonsense. We know how to do it right. It’s just that we haven’t done it right. It will take a long while, maybe –

AMY GOODMAN: How does that kind of building get enforced, Roger Bilham? How does that kind of building get enforced, the kind of building regulations you’re talking about?

ROGER BILHAM: Building inspectors are designed to come and watch every stage of a building’s assembly in the U.S.. You can’t put a building up in California, or in Colorado, even, without someone watching over your shoulder every step of a moment. You can’t go to the next step until you’ve received your certificate.

In a place like Karachi or Tehran, building codes are now being enforced, and that’s something that’s happening officially. However, in some parts of the world, it’s possible to talk to your building inspector and say, “Why don’t to come tomorrow, after I pour the concrete? Here’s, you know, a few hundred dollars to look the other way.”

And you might think, well, how can anyone be so stupid as to assemble a building without sufficient strength? The answer is, you can save money. And in the developing nations, there is this battle between what should be done and human nature, trying to either overtly make profits or covertly just to save money for the builders. You know, very often these –

AMY GOODMAN: And also the issue of poverty.

ROGER BILHAM: Yes. In Haiti, seismologists, my colleagues, told the Haitians that, in fact, large earthquakes were overdue, and they had happened a few hundred years ago, and there was enough strain now developed at the plate boundary to repeat a sequence of events that happened in the 1700s. Well, this knowledge is like kind of “dream on.” There are so many problems that Haiti had that even if they had started to act on retrofitting these buildings, it would have taken two, three decades. And there was no money for this. There are much more pressing issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, are there manmade situations or phenomena that are increasing the number of earthquakes? Does anything human beings do on earth have an effect on earthquakes, the number of earthquakes or their intensity?

ROGER BILHAM: Not really. I can’t say that it doesn’t happen at all. If you build a very large dam, you sometimes trigger an earthquake. But what we’re watching is just the relentless movement of the plates. And what the earth has in store for us are usually a hundred magnitude-7.0 earthquakes a year. Our future disasters depend whether those earthquakes occur close to cities that are vulnerable to shaking, or whether they occur away from these cities. And it’s a hit-or-miss problem.

But I forecast that it is possible now to have something that has never happened in earth’s history: an earthquake killing perhaps a million people. And how can you make such a ridiculous prediction? The answer is that never before have we had such large populations at risk from earthquakes, cities of 12 million. And there are many cities like this, and several of them, like Istanbul and Tehran, have a history of damaging earthquakes, and we may well see the effects of corruption and bad building practices revealed only after these earthquakes have struck.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, do you predict an earthquake in the United States anytime soon?

ROGER BILHAM: Well, we’re very careful not to predict earthquakes. We tried that with a harmless earthquake in a field of cows at Parkfield a few years ago and failed miserably.

What we can do, though, is forecast earthquakes, meaning that we know earthquakes will occur in something like a thirty-year window. And on the San Andreas Fault, of course, there are a couple of large earthquakes overdue, one near Palm Springs. It might reach up into the LA region through Palmdale and so on. That earthquake is known to be ripe, sufficiently mature to happen any day. It may not happen for a hundred years, but it’s certainly something they’re expecting. And, of course, earthquake resistance is pretty good in LA. I mean, the houses are made of wood, and earthquake-resistant design prevails throughout.

But there is a much larger earthquake that could occur, and that is from Cape Mendocino northwards through Oregon, up to Washington state. We are expecting in this country a magnitude-9.0 earthquake. This may — this, again, could occur now; it may not occur for a hundred years. But occur, it will. And when it does, it will test those building regulations that have been put into effect in places like Seattle. There is a large building stock that hasn’t had the benefit of earthquake-resistant construction from the start. One can think of a lot of masonry buildings that will be damaged. There will also be a very large tsunami. And yeah, this is something that is definitely going to occur in our future, or the next generation. And I think we are more or less ready for it, certainly much better prepared than Haiti and as well-prepared as Chile.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger Bilham, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of geology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, co-author with Susan Elizabeth Hough of After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet.

(1) Corrections made from original article regarding the terminology of ‘cement’ and ‘concrete’.
Cement is an ingredient of concrete, like flour is to bake a cake.

SOURCE: http://www.alternet.org

The critical thing is good design, Chris Raymond, acting head of the Ministry of Transportation Ontario bituminous section recently told an industry audience.

“If you can’t afford a good design, I tell agencies and municipalities, you can’t afford to waste your money on a poor design — you’ll just be throwing your money away,”

A strong advocate of the MTO’s Superpave standard, Raymond also said lift is important and urged opting for more thickness to ensure better roads and longevity.

“Unfortunately, costs drive agencies to go for minimum thickness,” he said, “Pavement wears from the top but falls apart from the bottom.”

With limited dollars and a growing number of kilometres to pave, owners cut back but will pay for it in the long run because those installations will fail long before they should and start to pothole and crack.

“A higher lift, say going from 40 mm to 50 mm, isn’t a 25 per cent increase in cost because while you are using more asphalt cement and materials your equipment and labour costs are the same,” Sandy Brown, technical director of the Ontario Hot Mix Producers Association told a seminar during an association convention.

Brown said the optimum lift depends on the type of traffic the road faces and accordingly which aggregate has been specified. Thinner lifts stretch the asphalt and budget further, but add to later maintenance and rehabilitation costs.

“Most of the problems we find in forensic engineering analysis is that something simple was done wrong in the beginning of the process,” said Dale Decker, president of Dale S Decker LLC, a U.S. expert consultant who outlined five steps to better pavement.

In the end, it comes down to best practices, said Decker, whose recommended steps start with a design that addresses quality and function required of the road, specifications that clearly define the work, inspection to ensure proper construction according to the design, construction combing technology, workmanship and maintenance.

He said road designers must for consistently look to state-of-the-art design standards — not just what’s always been used before.

“Perpetual pavements, for example, have been used around the world for years and we’re just getting to use them in the U.S.”

Making sure the job is being done correctly is also critical.

“Who are the inspectors? Are they certified? We’re they working as a Wal-Mart greeter yesterday and working as a road inspector today?”

There’s a continuing shift by owners to an “end result contract” in which the contractor is given free reign to determine the construction of the road as long as it meets specifications.

But contractors must shoulder more responsibility and partner with owners to realize value engineering rather than take the old adversarial stance, he added.

He said the last step is the one which fails more often.

“Maintenance and rehabilitation is my major pet peeve,” he says. “We built one of the top 10 transportation systems in the world, but now three-quarters of our bridges are structurally unsound and our highways are in the same situation because we didn’t maintain the system.”

Vince Aurilo, manager of pavement engineering services at DBA Engineering, who also spoke on the specification and inspection process at the seminar, said partnerships between owner and contractors will be increasingly important.

Reducing variations from specification in aggregate mix, careful inspection and sampling, using the right equipment in the right way with trained, skilled workers is the surest way to meet the standards and get smooth, long-lasting pavement, he said.

“Stopping and starting the paver or bumping the screed because you are not using a shuttle buggy, for example, leads to bumps and affects the thickness. We’re going for smooth because smooth lasts longer.”

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The ‘liquid granite,’ which is much like concrete, does not explode when it is exposed to extremely high temperatures and is said to have a four-hour fire rating.

The product uses a third less cement than is needed for concrete, and between 30 and 70 per cent of the material is from recycled sources.

The material has already been specified on Olympic Park projects, including the Village.

Professor Pal Mangat, director of the Centre of Infrastructure Management at Sheffield Hallam, said ‘Liquid granite is a very versatile material that can be used in a similar way to concrete. The product replaces most of the cement in standard concrete with a secret formula of products to change the basic properties of the material’.

Source: http://www.blog.emap.com

(Newark, California) — Amid buzz about algae biofuel and electric cars, some start-ups hope to use “green” technology to reinvent more mundane products like bricks and cement.

Workers at CalStar’s Newark, Calif., facility press the fly ash into a test mold.

CalStar Products Inc. plans to open a factory next month to make bricks from fly ash, a byproduct of coal burning. It claims to use roughly 85% less energy than traditional clay brick manufacturing, with an equivalent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions.

The Newark, California, start-up is one of many companies scrambling for a slice of the “green” building market, projected to grow to between $96 billion and $140 billion by 2013 from about $45 billion last year, including materials, technology and labor, according to research firm McGraw-Hill Construction.

Currently, the start-ups face a difficult market. Construction spending has plunged, a result of falling home prices and commercial real-estate values. But “the construction that is occurring is more likely to be green,” says Michele Russo, a research director at McGraw-Hill Construction.

Some investors are following the same logic. Venture capitalists invested $465 million in the U.S. green-building sector in the first nine months of 2009, compared with $284 million in the year-earlier period, says market-tracker Cleantech Group.

“While the rest of the industry has retreated…green construction has actually grown,” says Paul Holland, a partner at venture firm Foundation Capital, which has invested in CalStar.

Other start-ups developing green construction materials include Calera Corp. and Integrity Block Inc., both in California, which make cement and concrete blocks, respectively. Icynene Inc., Mississauga, Ontario, has a foam insulation spray made partly from castor oil, a substitute for fiberglass insulation.

“Innovation is not necessarily discovering new things, but discovering how to use old things in a new way,” says Amitabha Kumar, CalStar’s director of research and development.

The process for making clay bricks—mining clay, forming it into bricks and firing in kilns using coal or natural gas—has remained largely unchanged for decades, though manufacturers have made improvements to reduce environmental impacts.

CalStar forms its bricks from fly ash—a gray, chalky byproduct of burning coal— and a proprietary stew of chemicals. During eight hours of steam baths, the calcium in the fly ash hardens, making bricks that look, feel and act like their clay counterparts, Mr. Kumar says.

CalStar says the bricks are designed to meet standards set by ASTM International, a standards-setting organization, for things like strength, durability and water absorption—and will be installed in buildings for the first time early next year. CalStar says the bricks will be priced competitively with commercial clay bricks. In Chicago, for instance, its bricks will sell for 53 cents apiece on average, compared with 55 cents on average per commercial clay brick, Calstar says.

Executives at the Brick Industry Association argue that CalStar’s fly-ash products aren’t bricks by definition, and question whether they’ll last as long as clay bricks. “No one knows how the fly-ash unit will really perform,” says Dick Jennison, the trade group’s president.

Richard Klingner, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin who sits on the ASTM’s panel for brick standards, says the ASTM’s standards don’t apply to fly-ash bricks. That doesn’t mean they are unsuitable for buildings, he says, “it just means that there isn’t a standard for them yet.”

The Environmental Protection Agency says fly ash is not hazardous and has advocated its reuse in building materials, though an EPA spokeswoman says the agency is reconsidering the classification this year. Most fly ash is mixed into concrete or disposed of in landfills.

CalStar’s Caledonia, Wis., factory will recycle fly ash from a neighboring Wisconsin Energy Corp. coal plant, making 40 million bricks annually and shipping only to nearby cities, to minimize carbon-dioxide emissions.

Cement maker Calera aims to capture carbon-dioxide emissions before they are released into the atmosphere. The start-up, is backed by nearly $50 million from Khosla Ventures.

In Moss Landing, Calif., Calera will pipe exhaust fumes from Dynegy Inc.’s natural-gas-burning power plant to its pilot facility, set to open this year, where it will flush the gas through seawater or brackish water. That will produce chalky substances it can use to make cement.

Producing one ton of traditional cement releases roughly one ton of carbon dioxide, says Calera founder Brent Constantz. But making one ton of Calera cement captures half a ton of the greenhouse gas. And like CalStar’s bricks, Calera’s cement is less expensive to produce than traditional cement, he says.

By:Cari Tuna

Source: http://www.online.wsj.com

Scope of the Report

* Contains an executive summary and data on value, volume and segmentation

* Provides textual analysis of the industry’s prospects, competitive landscape and profiles of the leading companies

* Incorporates in-depth five forces competitive environment analysis and scorecards

* Covers the Global, European and Asia-Pacific markets as well as individual chapters on 5 major markets (France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US).

* Includes a five-year forecast of the industry

Highlights

The global coal market grew by 20.7% in 2008 to reach a value of $338.6 billion.

In 2013, the global coal market is forecast to have a value of $610.2 billion, an increase of 80.2% since 2008.

The global coal market grew by 4.6% in 2008 to reach a volume of 6.6 billion short tons.

In 2013, the global coal market is forecast to have a volume of 8.8 billion short tons, an increase of 34.4% since 2008.

Power generation segment dominates the global coal market, accounting for 65.1% of the market’s value.

Asia-Pacific accounts for 64.7% of the global coal market’s value.

China Shenhua Energy Co., Ltd. generates 3.1% of the global coal market’s value.

Why you should buy this report

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Market Definition

The coal market is defined as revenues due to the sale of coal for industry and power generation. Market volumes given within this profile are for both primary (anthracite, bituminous, and lignite) and secondary (anthracite, bituminous, and lignite briquets but excluding metallurgical coke) coal consumption. The market has been valued at annual average minemouth prices and does not include any transportation costs.

The product is a result of four years of research in Lafarge’s laboratories and several social housing sites.

For the development and testing of Thermedia 0.6 B in France, Lafarge has combined its scientific expertise with Bouygues Construction. Bouygues Construction carried out building engineering studies and carried out the implementation as well as the acceptance tests for all its characteristics.

This concrete is in keeping with the guidelines of the French Grenelle Environment Forum. It is intended for building envelope applications and introduces a new performance feature to concrete in construction systems.

Thermedia 0.6 B is a product made for the French market and meets an environmental and financial requirement. This concrete actively improves construction systems that integrate interior thermal insulation (ITI) by contributing to heat loss reductions through the building’s envelope.

Thermedia 0.6 B is the only structural ready-mix concrete that will combine strength and lightness, mechanical performances and thermal properties.

Thermedia 0.6 B’s specific mix design, patented by Lafarge, significantly limits heat losses in buildings.

Therefore, in cases of interior thermal insulation, this new concrete reduces the impact between building facades and intermediate floor by 35% in terms of thermal bridges.

Thermedia 0.6 B is produced at a batching plant and then cast on-site. The product’s fluidity and workability make it a material that is easy to use in traditional construction methods.

By: Rashmi Kalia (ARI-C NEWS)

The researchers, led by Erez Allouche, an assistant professor of civil engineering and associate director of the Trenchless Technology Center, and Sven Eklund, an assistant professor of chemistry, are working with a group of students to create a geopolymer concrete, or GPC, made from a waste byproduct produced by coal fired power plants called “fly ash.”

The power plants typically store the ash, one of the most abundant industrial byproducts on earth, in massive lagoons and storage facilities. That method of storage puts aquifers and surface bodies of fresh water in danger if storage goes awry, and takes up thousands of acres. But GPC can help eliminate the need for that storage.

“It is important research for the U.S. because it’s environmentally friendly,” said Ivan Diaz, a PhD candidate who has been working on the research team for several years.

“We’re keeping the fly ash out of the landfills and we’re creating a valuable material.”

The researchers use another byproduct from the paper pulp industry, sodium hydroxide, to start the reaction that turns fly ash into GPC.

The goal is to market GPC as a substitute for Portland cement, the most widely produced man-made material on earth and one scientists have pegged as a major contributor to global warming.

An estimated 5 percent to 8 percent of all human-generated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) worldwide comes from the concrete industry. More than 2.6 billion tons of Portland cement are produced per year, and production is growing 5 percent annually.

Compared to Portland cement, GPC produces 90 percent less CO2 during production.

According to Allouche, GPC offers several additional advantages compared to Portland cement.

GPC features greater resistance to corrosion, more fire resistance, greater strength and less shrinkage.

Companies have tried a mixture that used 85 percent Portland cement and 15 percent GPC, but “why use 15 percent we can use 100 percent?” Allouche asked.

So far, the Tech research team has produced a 5,000 pound block of GPC and constructed a 100-square foot gazebo made entirely of GPC.

The researchers are working with about 30 power plants to provide fly ash for the research, including Louisiana companies like Cleco Power of Pineville and Entergy.

Allouche said he foresees GPC being used for road and bridge construction, as well as for other civil-engineering products like sewer piping.

The researchers could reach that goal sooner rather than later, as Allouche said they are currently on the verge of marketing a sprayable geopolymer product.

“We’re not out to replace concrete, but we’d like to offer a complementary product,” he said.

Diaz said GPC is unlikely to replace Portland cement, but not because GPC isn’t a superior product.

“It’s not because it can’t do it, but because it’s really hard to change the minds of the civil-engineering community,” he said.

GPC currently costs about 15 percent more than Portland cement, “but that does not take into account savings (produced) by not having to store fly ash or ‘green’ tax credits,” Allouche said.

Allouche and Eklund, the other lead researcher, said the success of GPC will ultimately be determined by companies’ willingness to try something new.

“It’s up to the industry to accept it,” Allouche said.

By: Stephen Largen