From Source to Solution: CarbonCure’s Path Towards Lower Carbon Concrete

The concrete industry has an emissions challenge. Globally, the industry is responsible for an estimated 7% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Cement—the key binding ingredient in concrete—is the second-most widely used material in the world after water, and in 2022, global cement manufacturing produced 1.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2. If it were a country, the concrete industry would be the world’s third or fourth-largest emitter of CO2.

Concrete is an essential building material in today’s society: It’s durable, cost-effective and widely accessible across the world. And as the global population continues to grow and urbanize, demand is forecast to grow from 14 billion cubic metres to around 20 cubic metres over the next 25 years, which would result in an estimated additional 3.8 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions.

And the cement and concrete sector is responding: In 2021, the Global Cement and Concrete Association committed to producing net-zero concrete by 2025 through a range of technologies and policies, including the application of carbon capture technologies at an industrial scale.

What is carbon capture and utilization?

Carbon capture and utilization, or CCU, is the process of trapping CO2 as it’s emitted from a source such as power generation or an industrial facility, and storing it to prevent it from being released into the Earth’s atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

CarbonCure, a technology company based in Nova Scotia, is part of a small cohort of Canadian companies that have found a way to reduce the industry’s CO2 emissions. Its innovative solution injects excess CO2 from industrial processes into concrete, replacing some of the concrete’s carbon-intensive cement and helping to reduce emissions from concrete in the process.

“That carbon dioxide is permanently sequestered into the concrete,” explains Jamie Rogers, senior director of carbon strategy at CarbonCure. “This allows for a reduction in the amount of cement required to achieve equivalent strength for concrete.”

Since launching its carbon utilization technology in 2012, the company has developed additional technologies like a reclaimed water system, which upcycles wastewater from cement producers’ processes. Today, CarbonCure’s technologies are licensed to concrete producers and plants in nearly 30 countries across the world.

“Our technology has reduced or removed just over 600,000 metric tons of CO2 to date, which is the equivalent of taking 140,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year,” says Rogers.

Helping to make the case for carbon utilization technology with carbon credits

The CarbonCure team knew from the beginning that getting buy-in from producers would take time. The industry is conservative by nature. “It generally has not changed in terms of process for decades, even centuries,” says Rogers. “To take a leap of faith into this low-carbon economy, we really needed to create an incentive structure for the producers that would reward them for the activity.”

For the industry, like most environmentally sustainable tech investments, there’s a cost premium to retrofitting processes and systems with CCU technology. Rogers calls it the “green premium.”

“You need to incentivize the activity, and you need to pay for the green premium,” he says. To pull in producers and help fund the transition, CarbonCure issues carbon credits: Tradeable certificates generated by projects that avoid, reduce or remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The revenue from the carbon credits is shared with producers, which helps to maximize the returns on initial investments in CCU.

“This is a very data-driven process—you need to prove that each credit actually generated a metric ton of CO2 savings, and you need data to back that up,” says Rogers. CarbonCure draws data from the concrete plants’ batching software and hardware connected to its CO2 injection to verify the carbon credits. Each carbon credit represents a verified project—though it’s more of a portfolio of 15 to 30 producers and as many as a hundred different concrete plants.

“We’ve paid about US$5 million back to producers,” he says. That credit revenue share is a major incentive, says Rogers, especially in an industry with already slim margins. The carbon credits also give businesses in other industries an opportunity to reduce their environmental impact.

Using carbon credits to address your business’s Scope 3 emissions

It’s not just producers who have adopted CCU technology that can benefit from carbon credits. Rogers says he sees a major opportunity for CarbonCure and the CCU industry through the growing interest in reducing Scope 3 emissions. Scope 3 refers to a company’s emissions from upstream and downstream activities related to a product or service.

“Scope 3 has been this complicated challenge for corporations trying to meet their net-zero targets,” he says.

“There are a hundred thousand concrete plants across the world,” says Rogers. There’s no illusion CarbonCure will be able to get its technology into all of them. “It’s not going to be everywhere.”

But CarbonCure’s carbon credits can be an alternative for producers or companies outside of the sector that want to allocate a portion of their environmental sustainability investment to support other businesses as they embrace the technology.

There’s growing momentum surrounding Book & Claim, a concept used by the aviation industry where an airline without access to sustainable aviation fuel can “book” a certain amount of fuel and “claim” the benefits of it, while another airline actually uses it. The Center for Green Market Activation and the Rocky Mountain Institute in the U.S. are currently working on a similar model for the cement and concrete industry.

“Like a carbon credit, a corporation is buying a credit to pay for that green premium, but instead of it being outside of the value chain, it is directly related to the credit buyer’s concrete being poured,” says Rogers. “It helps focus attention on Scope 3 and embodied emissions in the built environment, bringing the concrete producer even closer to that decarbonization process.”

An opportunity for businesses to prepare for potential regulatory guidelines

Canada is currently in the research phase of developing guidelines for decarbonizing the building industry. Carbon credits are making their way into businesses’ environmental sustainability strategies to reduce and offset their own impact, says Brian Hong, director of the Environmental Markets Solutions Group, within RBC Capital Markets.

“Today it’s voluntary and the benefits are largely reputational or marketing,” says Hong. “But we are quickly shifting into something that companies, depending on what kind of commitments they have, must do. By participating in this market today you can hedge future regulatory risk.”

“It’s the most transparent, data-driven credit that targets industrial decarbonization,” Rogers says. “If you are anywhere in that supply chain—if you’re financing construction, developing buildings, if you live or work or live in a building…You know? Concrete is everywhere.”

Decarbonizing cement and concrete isn’t just about the industry, it has a reverberating impact. “The credit buyer community should want to invest their dollars into credits that are having a direct impact on the systems around them,” Rogers finishes. “And concrete is probably the most ubiquitous one in the world.”

Read more: Carbon Credits: How your business can get started