Cement

“A new form of cement will take, for instance, several hundred million before they, you know hit, hit any kind of scale.”

“In cement, where it's so short-term, It'd be really hard to get anybody to sign more than a five-year agreement, right?”

“In the greatest hits album of electrochemistry, you'd have a lot of tracks focused on batteries, for sure, and for good reason. But there are deeper cuts, too, and some new music with pretty extraordinary potential. Anyway, think tracks on cement and steel and…”

“This is true in commodities like steel and e-fuels because an influential end customer can push the rest of the chain to take a chance on a low-carbon product. It's definitely true here in Cement.”

“In cement, Where it's so short term, it'd be really hard to get anybody to sign more than a five-year agreement, right?”

“They realize this is going to, these regulations are going to double the price of cement in Europe, whether you're going to be paying for post-combustion carbon capture, or you're simply going to be paying the carbon price.”

“We're also importing about 20% of the cement we use, so shipping it from overseas.”

“So the staggering fact is that the U.S. Government buys half of the cement that's produced in the United States, and that's through the General Services Administration, which has three hundred million square feet of floor space, so they're the biggest real est…”

“When people do studies on these type of thing, they typically find that buildings use between 50 and a hundred percent more structural material than is required to comply with building codes, and they do that because the structural material, mainly steel and c…”

“So it's three things. It's cement, steel, and fossil fuels.”

“And just to clarify the cement and concrete, concrete is the building material, and cement is the binder, the glue. And about 90% of the emissions come from cement.”

“And the majority of the CO two emissions from cement come from that chemistry for releasing the CO two from the rock.”

“Because both structural failures and construction delays are way more expensive than the cement. They're like 10 to a hundred times more expensive.”

“The current production of cement actually relies on the production of electricity and steel from coal. And both of those industries' growth have slowed. And That is leading to a domino effect where the price of cement has been rising.”

“In the modern economy, we think that will be lower cost at scale.”

“Roughly half the cement that's used in the United States, for example, is contracted by governments to build essentially roads in public works”

“There's a proven green premium there. Like airlines are paying a premium for sustainable aviation fuel, not as obvious in some of these other hard debate sectors, like less clear and cement, for example, right? But in sustainable aviation fuel, it is happening…”

“There's also clear and consistent evidence that we definitely need Something and hydrogen is the thing at present for high temperature heat, for making cement, making steel, to replace fossil fuels for chemicals and fertilizer, and to provide some kind of carb…”

“And cement, just the process of making it fundamentally results in CO₂ emissions, even if you did full energy switching, efficiency, all that kind of thing. Basically you're cooking limestone that drives off CO two.”

“I think with regard to this category of CCS, I sometimes can convince myself that cement might be the only thing in this category where you need CCS to mitigate emissions from something.”

“There are some things that you can't directly electrify, and, you know, steel, cement, there are these Hard to abate sectors, and I think that green hydrogen, we're going to need a molecule, you know, it's probably not going to be an electron, it'll be a molec…”

“And if you think about what's happening today with the labor shortage, you can see industries like cement getting booked out three to six months in advance, right?”

“Steel, aluminum, cement, chemicals, aviation, shipping, and trucking. Add them up, and they represent about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they're the sectors where the existing, fully commercialized, mature, and ready-to-deploy technology wil…”

“In all of our different sectors now, cement, steel maybe not aviation fuels entirely, in almost all of our sectors, it is now as inexpensive to build the clean alternative as it is the dirty one, thanks to the IRA.”

“It's responsible for something on the order of six to eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, right up with steel for the largest source of industrial emissions in the world.”

“Well, concrete is about 90% rocks and 10% cement, but even so, cement is the most massively produced man-made material in the world, and second most consumed material besides water.”

“So the average small Portland cement plant produces a million tons of cement per year, and they go all the way up to three or four, maybe even five million tons of cement produced per year.”

“And, you know, on average one ton of cement, just rounding up to big numbers, one ton of cement produces one ton of CO₂.”

“Cement being the most massive industry by volume in the world also produces an almost equivalent amount of CO₂, and that's, you know, again, speaking, speaking in big even numbers, it's roughly half from the fossil fuel needed to get to a thousand degrees and …”

“However, it will only absorb the limestone emissions. So it'll only absorb about half of its original CO two footprint.”

“And this has just always been a really tough space because the places where you have a lot of volume, like, you know, making cement you have really low commodity prices. So it's hard to get a good price for the carbon that you're capturing. And in places where…”

“It takes more steel. It takes more cement to build a wind farm than it does on, on a, you know, a normalized basis that the amount of material to produce a gigawatt hour, say of energy per year it, you know, we're on the order of probably something like seven …”

“We're going to need it for cement because there are no alternative chemistries coming down the pipe anytime soon, and there's a lot of buildings that need to be built.”

“They're already the third largest source of industrial greenhouse gas emissions behind steel and cement.”