Effective and timely collaboration regarding decarbonation technologies will be key to minimising the effects of climate change, no more so than in hard-to-abate sectors like cement production. It is with this aim that the World Cement Association and Decarb Connect began a new partnership in 2020. Global Cement recently spoke to both parties about the journey so far and what cement producers can learn from other sectors.
Global Cement (GC): Please could you introduce Decarb Connect and how it operates?
Alex Cameron, Founder, Decarb Connect (AC): Decarb Connect was founded in early 2020 to facilitate discussion and collaboration around decarbonisation in hard-to-abate industries like cement, steel, ceramics, glass and power. From my background in conference production and network development, I could see that there was an unmet need to connect disparate sectors and share best practice.
What hard-to-abate sectors have historically been less adept at is looking over their ‘silo wall’ to consider approaches taken by other sectors. This is where Decarb Connect comes in. Our work involves making connections and providing information to participants in the hard-to-abate sectors which otherwise would not come into contact with each other. We do this by sharing best practice, for example in our podcast and an online conference that we held in January 2021. We also have a private members group for industrial participants only, which is already proving to be a very fruitful ground for knowledge transfer and collaboration.
GC: How did the partnership between Decarb Connect and the WCA begin?
AC: I was aware that the WCA could be an important partner for Decarb Connect and was persistent in approaching Ian Riley over the first half of 2020. He was a valuable early point of contact within cement and he kindly answered many of my early stage questions regarding the sector. We are both glad that our early conversations have now developed into a partnership, including online events, his appearances on our podcast and the cement sector’s valuable contribution to our networks.
Ian Riley, CEO, WCA (IR): Cement and concrete are, and will remain, vital building materials for many decades to come. What we need to do is decarbonise their production, which is why we are collaborating with Decarb Connect and other partners. There has been some negative coverage in the UK press lately, which shows that the sector needs to explain both the need for concrete and what we are doing to reduce its environmental footprint to the general public more effectively. It is also important that researchers and suppliers know that cement represents an attractive opportunity for novel abatement technologies.
GC: What are the most interesting lessons in terms of decarbonisation that other hard-to-abate sectors can take from the cement sector?
AC: When I founded Decarb Connect, I found many who felt that they were the ‘only one’ working on decarbonisation in their field, with the perception that not much was going on. This was as recently as 12 months ago.
Fortunately, Decarb Connect has been in a position to correct this misconception. In many conversations, I have been able to draw on the many well-developed and diverse cement sector CO2 abatement projects, many of which your readers will be familiar with. Indeed, the cement sector has been very proactive with regards to decarbonisation compared to other hard-to-abate sectors, which may surprise some industry participants.
Crucially, the examples from the cement sector are not just of low-CO2 cement and concrete products but also process alterations where the approach can apply to other sectors. Aside from insights around specific projects, the cement sector can also offer insights on effective ways to initiate collaboration and funding structures. Some of the larger projects in the cement sector, for example the LEILAC project in Belgium and the Norcem Brevik project in Norway, have many partners. This collaborative approach to innovation is far rarer across other hard-to-abate sectors, where individual companies are much more likely to go it alone. There are a lot of lessons to learn from this ‘collaborative approach to competition,’ which I feel will be crucial for effective decarbonisation in the hard-to-abate sector.
GC: What can other hard-to-abate sectors teach the cement sector?
IR: In the cement sector’s quest for net zero CO2 emissions the traditional levers of process efficiency, alternative fuels and lower clinker factor are only going to get us part of the way to zero net carbon emissions. Most of the new technologies are coming from outside of the industry.
There are many possibilities, which the WCA and its members are looking at alongside Decarb Connect. Indeed, many of these will only be revealed as its networks develop. However, one example that I have become aware of recently is the methanation of flue gases, which has its roots in the oil and gas sector. Instead of capturing the CO2 and storing it or transporting it for some other use, methanation combines renewably produced hydrogen with a portion of the flue gas CO2 to produce methane. In the cement sector this could then be fired in the kiln, substituting coal. This would reduce the amount of CO2 that needs to be captured to just that from the process (i.e. from the limestone), which will help the economics of CO2 capture and storage / utilisation (CCUS).
There are also various technologies that inject CO2 into concrete products, use it to form synthetic aggregates or to beneficiate supplementary cementitious materials like fly ash. Overall, there are probably greater opportunities for the use of CO2 from other sectors in the building materials sector than the other way round. The trick, however, is to be flexible, as local conditions will affect what is viable in any given situation.
I think we will see the measurement of embodied CO2 stretch out the cement industry ‘silo’ that Alex mentioned earlier, to fully include supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) for example. How do you share the emissions, however, from fly ash and slag, for example? The steel industry and cement industry may not see eye-to-eye and that disagreement cannot continue if we want proper decarbonisation in either sector. The way such emissions are accounted for needs to be resolved, because, until we can do that, the full picture will be hard to see. It is the same story with alternative fuels, where the CO2 emissions can get lost in the gaps. Discussions like those taking place under Decarb Connect’s network will help us to reach appropriate solutions.
GC: Is the cement sector harder or easier to abate than other hard-to-abate sectors?
IR: The big challenge for our sector is that the majority of the emissions from cement production come from the process CO2 rather than the fuel, which is the case with other hard-to-abate sectors. These emissions are inherent to the process. The volume of CO2 produced compared to the monetary value of the product is extremely high, which puts cement and concrete in a difficult position. The only thing that comes even close is steel. This means that, without incentives, cement producers who reduce CO2 emissions would not be able to compete with those that take no action. National and regional governments must therefore step in to provide stronger incentives towards the behaviour that they want to see. If you take the EU ETS, it hasn’t really worked due to the free allocation system in the cement sector. With Phase Four of the ETS, however, we should finally see much stronger drivers towards low-CO2 products and CCUS.
AC: I see shared challenges across the hard-to-abate sectors, which certainly apply to the cement sector. Firstly, without the full maturation of the market for low-CO2 products, there will be a hesitance for manufacturers to fully invest in ways to make them. While some buyers are starting to factor CO2 emissions into their specifications, this is not the default approach. Ian points towards the need for incentives from government. One such incentive could be for government projects to specify low-CO2 building materials and to mandate low-CO2 options for large private projects.
GC: How can Decarb Connect and the WCA speed up decarbonisation?
AC: We need to open up channels of communication, which is one of Decarb Connect’s major strengths. This improves decision-making and enables better informed decisions to be taken more quickly, which speeds up projects.
In the longer term, the aspiration for Decarb Connect is to bring policymakers to properly develop the market for lower CO2 products. Our online event in January 2021 was an early step in this journey.
IR: All media can help to make people aware that governments have an essential role to play. Governments keep talking up the need to decarbonise, but then have a tendency to step back from action.
GC: Where is decarbonisation gaining most traction at present and where is it lagging behind?
IR: From a cement technology standpoint, the majority of relevant technology is coming from the US. There has also been a recent change in tone from the Chinese cement industry, where the government, of course, has now committed itself to net zero CO2 emissions by 2060. India is potentially very vulnerable to climate change, and there has been an awakening in the very substantial cement industry there in recent years.
There is also growing interest in the Middle East and North Africa, for example in Morocco. Turkey, which has major export interests in the EU, is also turning its attention to CO2 mitigation in anticipation of a possible Border Adjustment Mechanism (BAM) as part of the EU ETS.
GC: What are the best regulations / stimuli that can encourage decarbonisation in general?
IR: It’s different solutions for different locations and, as with the technical solutions, the US is a strong area for different approaches. The 45Q tax incentive provides US$20/t of CO2 that is geologically stored and US$10/t of CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery, for example. In New York state, a credit is ascribed to low-CO2 building materials in the bidding process for public works. If the extra cost of the lower-CO2 solution is less than a certain threshold, compared to the lowest bid with conventional emissions, then the low-CO2 bid is legally considered to be the ‘lowest cost’ bid. This is a low-cost way to push forward green products, which as they become more widely-available will drive increased uptake.
On the other side, a cap-and-trade system such as the EU ETS is great in theory but, as we have seen, can have unintended consequences. It worked for the power sector in the EU, because there was no threat of imports. This makes it possible to pass the additional cost of emitting CO2 to the end consumer. However, as cement demand in the EU has dropped since the ETS was designed, the free allocations were sufficient to cover all emissions and to subsidise exports.
AC: I’ll come back to my earlier point about wider development of the market for low-CO2 products, regardless of the product. So often it feels like governments select a chosen mechanism to reduce emissions and then hammer that home. We need a system-wide view of how governments and private firms procure low carbon products rather than viewing decarbonisation as an add-on to our current systems. At the end of the day, we cannot expect the full cost of CO2 to sit on the cement producer or steel producer. It has to be distributed across the value chain.
GC: Thank you for your time and insights today.
IR/AC: You are very welcome indeed.