A New Carbon Ontology: Hydrocarbons as Benign Material Resource for Civilizational-Scale Building

The talk will frame the macro scale of building and infrastructure development forecast for coming decades, especially in regions of population and economic growth, and highlight the startling environmental impact implicit in current building materials and methods as well as the in-use energy and maintenance footprints. Alternative materials that mitigate such impacts will be considered, such as mass timber, but the prime focus will be on emerging polymeric composite material-processing that has proved so successful in many other manufacturing sectors, especially in their remarkable structural capacity. A case will be made that adoption of polymeric composites offers potential for radical revision of building methods, with potential for civilizational-scale adoption in short timelines; and it will map out the environmental benefits that this might offer in both embodied and in-use impact. The challenges and impediments to broad uptake of hydrocarbon-derived buildings will be considered, and thoughts offered as to how these might be addressed effectively, with particular focus on fire retardancy and the economics of production. Emerging gas-deposition of carbon nanotube and graphene materials will be probed, which offer remarkable potential for poly-functional carbon dwellings that are suggestive of an elegant new carbon ontology: a carbon shroud for a carbon organism!



The talk will serve as a call for collaboration between upstream and downstream actors as vital to breaking into a highly entrenched and deeply conservative building “industry”. The need for radical new building technologies merits a purposeful mobilization (political, technical, logistical) that aims at nothing less than a massive re-orientation of hydrocarbon assets from prime use as fuel to prime use as building materials at a period of unprecedented urban development and against the backdrop of a mounting environmental crisis.