Is CarbonCure the Concrete Industry's 'SodaStream'?
With $7.5 Million in Carbon XPRIZE Competition winnings in hand, CarbonCure is looking to cement its place in the Global Concrete Industry.
Each year, humans produce 30 billion metric tons of concrete globally, containing 4 billion tons of cement (the industry’s primary culprit for CO2 emissions), and this number is expected to rise 50% by 2050. The concrete industry is responsible for roughly 8% of global CO2 emissions while also consuming 2-3% of the global energy supply.1 The path to net-zero will not be easy and there is no silver bullet – we will need to deploy many efficiency and process solutions through the value chain.
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia based, CarbonCure is on a mission to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment by 500 million tons annually by 2030.2 Their technology involves injecting recycled liquid carbon dioxide into (AKA, carbonating) fresh concrete to both improve its compressive strength and reduce its carbon footprint by up to 4.6%3, making concrete a climate solution!
While CarbonCure’s direct competition is lacking, there are alternatives for decarbonizing concrete. In the short term, these include sequestering carbon into aggregates, using alternative aggregates, and curing concrete with CO2. Longer term, large scale renewables and green-hydrogen fueled cement kilns will help get the cement industry close to net zero. These technologies will become more cost efficient through changing energy markets and rising carbon taxes.
The scale of the concrete industry and the carbon intensity of its value chain make alternative approaches to decarbonization complementary solutions to CarbonCure’s technology rather than substitutes. CarbonCure’s commercialization of their scalable, patented technology has not only set them up as a pioneer and incumbent in early age concrete carbonation - it helped them secure the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE.
Just as my SodaStream will not bring my carbon footprint to zero; CarbonCure will not decarbonize the concrete industry alone – but they’re off to a great start!
International Energy Agency; Nat. Mater. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/nmat4930
Environmental Impact of Concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concrete#Carbon_concrete