Displaying items by tag: Solidia Technologies

US: The US Department of Energy has granted Solidia Technologies US$2.1m in funding for the development and testing of carbonation methods for its Solidia Cement. Solidia will research synthetic supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) production methods using direct CO₂ capture and utilisation.

CEO Russell Hill said “We are proud to partner with the US Department of Energy to continue innovating and ultimately deliver on our mission to provide commercially viable decarbonisation technologies and sustainable solutions for the global construction and building materials industries. The funding will advance our carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies and synthetic SCMs that can be easily integrated into Portland cement-based concrete formulations, offering manufacturers a solution that is sustainable environmentally and economically.”

US: Solidia Technologies has appointed Padmaja Parakala as its director of research and development.

She holds 20 years of experience working in corporate material science, most recently working for Innovantage, a professional services firm she founded that has worked with Solidia Technologies and the Boral Innovation Factory. Prior to this she worked as the principal scientist and product performance leader at James Hardie Building Products in Australia. Earlier in her career she also worked for GE at the John F Welch Technology Center.

Parakala holds s PhD in material engineering from the Queensland University of Technology and master’s degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the Indian Institute of Technology in Varanasi.

US: Solidia Technologies has appointed Russell Hill as its chief technology officer. He succeeds Nicholas DeCristofaro, who will retire in September 2021.

Hill joins Solidia after 25 years working for Boral, most recently as Group Chief Innovation Officer. In 2012, he led the discovery and development of a new series of ‘green’ products that opened new market segments and geography to the building materials producer. Hill holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of North Texas and is named as an inventor on 56 patents, consisting of over 20 distinct families. He is a member of the American Concrete Institute, ASTM, the American Chemical Society and Alpha Chi Sigma.

Solidia Technologies produces reduced-CO₂ concrete with lower-energy cement and water-free CO₂ curing.

US: Solidia Technologies has appointed Bryan Kalbfleisch appointed as its chief executive officer.

Kalbfleisch holds two decades of experience leading manufacturing operations producing concrete, asphalt, and other building materials. He previously worked at Summit Materials, an aggregates-based construction materials company, where he served as president of both its Texas Region and Houston-based Alleyton Resource. He also previously served as president of Fayetteville, APAC Central for Oldcastle (CRH), North America's largest manufacturer of building products and materials. His career was launched in the ready-mix concrete division of Central Pre-Mix Concrete Company, which was sold to Oldcastle in 1997.

US: Solidia Technologies has raised US$78.0m-worth of private investment in a funding round. The latest investors include Imperative Ventures, Zero Carbon Partners and Breakthrough Energy Investors. Existing backers providing new funds include BP, John Doerr and OGCI Climate Investments, which is the venture capital arm of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a consortium of multinational oil companies. Solidia Technologies produces reduced-CO2 concrete with lower-energy cement and water-free CO2 curing.

US: Solidia Technologies and France-based Chryso have announced a collaborative partnership for the further development of the Solidia ‘ultra-low’ CO₂ concrete product. The companies plan to use their “combined expertise to improve the sustainability performance and material properties” of the concrete.

“Incorporating Chryso’s exclusive water-reducing admixtures adapted to the specific chemistry of Solidia Concrete, will further reduce water consumption in the curing process,” said Tom Schuler, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Solidia Technologies.

US: Solidia Technologies has filed a patent for a new hydraulic cement consisting of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) and other supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) including lime, alkali hydroxides, clay minerals and over 10% synthetic pozzolan.

Solidia Technologies said, “In order to reduce global CO₂ emissions it is necessary to adopt new approaches to create a new generation of hydraulic cements. The most efficient cement kiln can produce OPC clinker with an associated emission of 816 kg of CO₂/t. Blending the ground cement clinker with SCM, which have low or zero associated production CO2 emissions, reduces the total embodied CO₂ of the final product. Using a cement with the lowest possible clinker factor for a given application is the most common industry approach to reducing the CO₂ footprint of concrete.”

Switzerland/US: LafargeHolcim has announced the extension of its partnership with Solidia Technologies to mid-2020. Cash News has reported that the partnership, which has seen a 30% reduction in LafargeHolcim’s overall CO₂ emissions since its formation in mid-2013, aims to achieve a 70% reduction in the producer’s carbon footprint.

Cement and concrete products with sustainability credentials have increased in recent years as societies start to demand decarbonisation. In spite of the recent drop in the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) price, there has been a trend in recent years in the construction industry towards offerings with better environmental credentials. Indeed, this week’s position paper from Cembureau on a carbon border mechanism concerns directly the growth of these kinds of products within Europe. Typically, the higher profile projects have been slag cement or concrete implementations such as Hanson’s use of its Regen cement substitute in a London sewer project or David Ball Group’s Cemfree concrete in a road project also in the UK. In this short review we’ll take a selective look at a few of the so-called low carbon cement and concrete products currently available.

Table 1: Some examples of methods to reduce embodied CO₂ in cement and concrete. Note - the product examples are selective. In some cases many other products are available.

Looking at cement first, the easiest way for many producers to bring a lower carbon product to market has been to promote cements made using secondary cementitious materials (SCM) such as granulated blast furnace slag or fly ash. These types of cements have a long history, typically in specialist applications and/or in relation to ease of supply. For example, cement producers in eastern India often manufacture slag cements owing to the number of local steel plants. However, cement producers have more recently started to publicise their environmental credentials as they reduce the clinker factor of the final product. Alongside this though, in Europe especially, a number of so-called low carbon cement producers have appeared on the scene such as EcoCem and Hoffman Green Technologies. These newer producers tend to offer SCM cement products or other low carbon ones built around a grinding model. It is likely that their businesses have benefitted from tightening EU environmental legislation. How far cement producers can pivot to SCM cement products is contentious given that slag and fly ash are finite byproducts of other industries that are also under pressure to decarbonise. Although it should be noted that other SCMs such as pozzolans exist.

As will be seen below a few of the methods to reduce embodied CO₂ in cement and concrete can be used in both materials. SCMs are no exception and hold a long history in concrete usage. As mentioned above David Ball Group sells Cemfree a concrete product that contains no cement. Harsco Environmental, a minerals management company, invested US$3m into Carbicrete, a technology start-up working on a cement-free concrete, in late 2019.

Limestone calcined clay cements are the next set of products that are starting to make an appearance through the work of the Swiss-government backed LC3 project, more commercial offerings like FutureCem from Cementir and H-EVA from Hoffman Green Technologies and today’s announcement about ThyssenKrupp’s plans to fit the Kribi cement plant in Cameroon with its Polysius activated clay system. They too, like SCM cements, reduce the clinker factor of the cement. The downside is that, as in the name, the clay element needs to be calcined requiring capital investment, although LC3 make a strong case in their literature about how fast these costs can be recouped in a variety of scenarios.

Calcium silicate cements offer reduced process emissions by decreasing the lime content of the clinker lowering the amount of CO₂ released and bringing down the temperature required in the kiln to make the clinker. Solidia offers its calcium silicate cement as part of a two-part system with a CO₂ cured concrete. In the US LafargeHolcim used Solidia’s product in a commercial project in mid-2019 at a New Jersey paver and block plant. Solidia’s second core technology is using CO₂ to cure concrete and reducing water usage. They are not alone here as Canada’s CarbonCure Technologies uses CO₂ in a similar way with their technology. In their case they focus more on CO₂ mineralisation. In Germany, Schwenk Zement backed the Celitement project, which developed a hydraulic calcium hydro silicate based product that does not use CO₂ curing. Celitement has since become part of Schwenk Zement.

Solidia isn’t the only company looking at two complementary technologies along the cement-concrete production chain. A number of companies are looking at recycling concrete and demolition waste. Generally this splits into coarse waste that is used as an aggregate substitute in concrete and fine waste that is used to make cement. LafargeHolcim has Evopact for the coarse waste and Susteno for the fine. HeidelbergCement has EcoCrete for the coarse and is researching the use of fines. Closing the loop for heavy building material producers definitely seems like the way to go at the moment and this view is reinforced by the involvement of the two largest multinational producers.

Of the rest of the other low carbon cement methods detailed in table 1 these cover other non-Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) such as geopolymer and calcium sulphoaluminate cements. The former are a type of alkali activated binder and generally lack common standards. The latter are similar to slag cements in that they are established specialist products with lower CO₂ emissions than OPC.

With concrete when trying to make a low carbon product the first choice is whether to choose a low-carbon cement as the binder or even not to use cement at all in the case of Regen or Cemfree. From here the next step is to simply use less cement in a concrete mixture. There are a number of ways to do this from optimising aggregate gradation, following performance specifications more closely, using strength tests like maturity methods and generally adhering to quality control protocols better to deliver more consistency. Read the Mineral Production Association (MPA) publication Specifying Sustainable Concrete for more detail on this. Using concrete admixtures can also help make concrete more sustainable by improving quality and performance at construction sites through the use of plasticisers and accelerators, by decreasing embodied carbon through the use of water reducers and by improving the whole life performance of concretes. The use of locally-sourced aggregates is also worth noting here since it can reduce associated transport CO₂ emissions.

More novel methods of reducing embodied CO₂ emissions in concrete include the use of geopolymer concrete in the case of Zeobond Group’s E-Crete or adding graphene as Concrene does. Like geopolymer cements, geopolymer concretes are relatively new and lack common standards. Products like Concrene, meanwhile, remain currently at the startup level. Finally, if all else fails, offsetting the CO₂ released by a cement or concrete product is always an option. This is what Cemex has done with its Vertua Ultra Zero product. The first 70% reduction in embodied CO₂ is gained through the use of geopolymer cement. Then the remaining 30% reduction is achieved through a carbon offsetting scheme via a carbon neutral certification verified by the Carbon Trust.

As can be seen, a variety of methods exist for cement and concrete producers to reduce the embodied CO₂ of their products and call them ‘low-carbon.’ For the moment most remain in the ‘novelty section’ but as legislators promote and specifiers look for sustainable construction they continue to become more mainstream. What has been interesting to note from this short study is that some companies are looking at multiple solutions along the production and supply chain whilst others are concentrating on single ones. The companies looking at multiple methods range from the biggest building material producers like LafargeHolcim and HeidelbergCement to smaller newer ones like Solidia and Hoffman Green Technologies. Also of note is that many of these products have existed already in various forms for a long time like SCM cements and concretes or the many ways concretes can be made more sustainable through much simpler ways such as changing aggregate sourcing or working more efficiently. In many cases once markets receive sufficient stimulus it seems likely that low carbon cement and concrete products will proliferate.

Global Cement is researching a market report on low carbon cement and concrete. If readers have any comments to make please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

US: Solidia Technologies has partnered with Xpansic CBL Holding Group (XCHG) to develop data technology products for precise measurement of CO₂ emissions and water usage in cement production. “Digital Feedstock enables industrial consumers to seamlessly connect sustainability ambitions with procurement decisions, wholly disrupting the way the cement industry meets consumer demand for accountability,” said Solidia Technologies CEO Tom Schuler.

Solidia Technologies produces reduced-CO₂ concrete with lower-energy cement and water-free CO₂ curing.