Displaying items by tag: funding

US: The US Department of Energy may end the Industrial Demonstrations Program that aims to decarbonise hard-to-abate industries like cement, placing up to US$6bn in federal grants at risk, according to Canary Media. This includes an eventual US$500m in Heidelberg Materials North America’s Mitchell cement plant carbon capture project in Indiana. The project is reportedly at risk after 'significant' staff cuts at the Department of Energy.

The senior vice president of sustainability and public affairs for Heidelberg Materials North America, David Perkins, said that the company was ‘uncertain’ and that ‘coordination and communications [had] changed’. He added that the company is still submitting reports for the grant to the Department of Energy and exploring alternative funding sources.

US: Queens Carbon has secured US$10m in seed funding to scale up production of its novel cement and supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The start-up will build a 2000t/yr demonstration plant at strategic partner Buzzi Unicem USA's Stockertown, Pennsylvania, cement plant. The plant will demonstrate Queens Carbon’s low-energy Q-Reactor technology, which employs novel hydrothermal chemistry, with the help of steam and pressure, to combine standard cement feedstocks into carbon-neutral hydraulic cement and SCMs. The company’s flagship product, Q-SCM, is capable of replacing up to 50% of cement in concrete mixes. Queens Carbon says that it will now also begin preparations for its first full-scale commercial plant.

Buzzi Unicem USA was among investors in the seed funding round, led by Climate technologies investor Clean Energy Ventures, with participation from fellow venture capital firm Plug and Play.

Queens Carbon CEO Daniel Kopp said "With support from Clean Energy Ventures, Buzzi Unicem USA and the US Department of Energy, we're building next-generation technology and assembling the creative talent needed to drive industry revenues to move cement innovation forward and significantly reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production, all without a green premium."

Luigi Buzzi, Chief Technology Officer at Italy-based Buzzi, said "We know that achieving our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 demands forward-thinking solutions to enhance both our operations and our environmental performance.”

Türkiye: TSKB (Industrial Development Bank of Türkiye) has signed a €75m investment loan agreement with Oyak Cement to fund renewable energy and waste heat recovery (WHR) projects. The funding will support the construction of a 115MW solar power plant in Beypazarı, Ankara, and waste heat recovery facilities at the Ankara, Adana and Mardin cement plants.

Oyak Cement general manager Murat Sela said “We have accelerated our investments for the Beypazarı solar power plant, as well as the WHR facility investments with a total installed capacity of 13.5 MW at our Adana, Ankara and Mardin plants. We expect these investments to help generate 237,000MW/yr of energy, while increasing the total renewable energy utilisation rate at our plants from 9% to 30%.”

Ireland: Ecocem has secured €4m in research funding as part of the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder Challenges 2024 in order to optimise electric arc furnace (EAF) slag for low-carbon cement production. The four-year programme is funded by Horizon Europe and will explore ways to enhance EAF slag reactivity and its suitability as a supplementary cementitious material without compromising cement durability. The project was submitted to the Pathfinder Challenge 2 call: “Towards Cement and Concrete as a Carbon Sink.”

Corporate development executive director Eoin Condren said “For many years, we have been pioneering the use of a range of slags and cementitious materials to create scalable and durable low-carbon cement. Thanks to this grant, we will continue our groundbreaking work as the steel industry transitions to new manufacturing processes, delivering a viable solution for a new generation of waste from steel.”

Denmark: Air Liquide and Cementir Holding, via its Danish subsidiary Aalborg Portland, have signed the European Innovation Fund grant agreement for the ACCSION project at the Aalborg cement plant. The project aims to reduce the plant’s CO₂ emissions by 1.5Mt/yr, with the captured CO₂ transported via pipeline to onshore CO₂ storage facilities.

The value of the Innovation Fund grant is €220m, fully financed by the EU Emissions Trading System.

Australia: Boral will receive US$15.4m in government funding for a kiln feed optimisation project at its Berrima Cement Works, with CO₂ emissions expected to reduce by up to 100,000t/yr, based on predicted production rates. The Powering the Regions grant will support the producer’s installation of a new specialised grinding circuit and supporting infrastructure, which will raise the use of alternative raw materials in kiln feed to 23% from 9%, lowering the amount of limestone used.

Boral will use steel manufacturing by-products and industrial waste, including granulated blast furnace slag, steel slag, cement fibre board, fly ash and recycled fine concrete aggregates. The project will be operational in 2028.

The head of innovation and sustainability at Boral, Ali Nezhad, said “In terms of the resulting emissions intensity of the manufactured clinker, the project will result in up to 11% reduction in clinker emission intensity, 9% attributable to a reduction in calcination emissions and 2% attributable to thermal efficiency gains.”

UBE Mitsubishi Cement recently released an update on its commercial scale demonstration using ammonia as a fuel at its Ube plant. It is currently testing the use of ammonia in both the cement kiln and calciner at the site. It has set the aim of reaching a 30% coal substitution rate with ammonia in the cement kiln by the end of March 2025. It has described the project as a world first. Planned future work includes running ammonia combustion tests alongside post-consumer plastics.

The company announced the three-year project in mid-2023. Utilities company Chubu Electric Power has been working on it and UBE Corporation has been supplying the ammonia for the test. The scheme dates back to before Mitsubishi Materials and Ube Industries merged their cement businesses in 2022. Ube Industries previously took part in a government research project looking at the topic, running combustion tests and numerical analysis in small industrial furnaces.

Another ammonia research project in the cement sector was revealed in 2024 by Heidelberg Materials in the UK. The company was awarded just under €0.40m in funding by Innovate UK through its UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) fund, together with engineering consultants Stopford and Cranfield University. The 12-month feasibility study aimed to assess the use of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier and evaluate the most economical method of on-site ammonia cracking to generate hydrogen for use by clinker kilns. It also intended to investigate the various tiers of the UK's existing ammonia supply chain network for the suitable transportation, offloading and storage of ammonia.

The UK project explained that it was looking at ammonia as a hydrogen carrier due to its high volumetric energy density. This, potentially, makes ammonia easier and cheaper to store and transport than hydrogen. It pointed out that storing and transporting hydrogen is difficult and the chemical is expensive. It also noted that the volumetric energy density of ammonia is 45% higher than that of liquid hydrogen. The benefit of switching to a zero-carbon fuel was that it could cut CO₂ emissions by the cement and concrete sector in the UK by 16%.

The attraction of ammonia to the cement industry is similar to that of hydrogen. Both are versatile chemicals that can be produced and used in a variety of ways. The production processes and supply chains of both chemicals are linked. The Haber–Bosch process, for example, uses hydrogen to manufacture ammonia. It can also be cracked to release the hydrogen. When used as fuels neither release CO₂ emissions directly. This comes down to the method of production. Like hydrogen, there is a similar informal colour scheme indicating carbon intensity (Grey, Blue, Green and Turquoise). Despite the advantages listed above, the disadvantages of using ammonia include toxicity and NO_x emissions, as well as the fact that there is little experience of using ammonia as a fuel. The worldwide ammonia market was bigger by volume in 2023 with production of just under 200Mt compared to hydrogen production of just under 100Mt.

Back in Japan, the national government has been promoting the use of ammonia technology for the power generation sector. It added ammonia to the country’s national energy plan in the early 2020s following research on running power plants with a mixture of ammonia and coal. The ambition is to build up levels of ammonia co-firing at power plants, develop the necessary technology and grow supply chains. This, it is hoped, will broaden, diversify and decarbonise the domestic energy mix and pull together a new international market too. Unfortunately, this strategy has had criticism. One study by BloombergNEF in 2022 estimated, for example, that the electricity cost of Japan-based power stations switching to firing ammonia by 2050 would be more expensive than generation from renewables such as solar or wind.

This explains why the ammonia project by UBE Mitsubishi Cement is leading the way. The interest by a European cement company shows that others are thinking the same way too. Yet again, the potential decarbonisation solution for cement is likely to lead towards more complex industrial supply chains. The next steps to watch will be whether a cement plant in Japan actually starts to co-fire ammonia on a regular basis and if any more ammonia projects pop up elsewhere around the world.

Europe: 77 decarbonisation projects (including 14 for the cement sector) have signed grant agreements under the Innovation Fund 2023 Call (IF23), following the announcement of results in October 2024. The cement projects, spanning nine European countries, will begin operations between 2025 and 2029.

The funding, sourced from the EU Emissions Trading System, provides grants ranging from €4.4m to €234m, supporting projects expected to avoid 118Mt of CO₂. The total 77 projects funded have the potential to reduce emissions by around 398Mt of CO₂ equivalent over their first 10 years of operation. The projects funded in the cement industry mostly involve carbon capture and storage (CCS). Among the selected CCS projects are Carbon2Business in Germany, Olympus in Greece, Go4Zero in Belgium and Cementir’s Accsion project in Denmark.

Canada: Heidelberg Materials North America has secured government support from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) for its carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) project at its Edmonton cement plant in Alberta. The project aims to capture over 1Mt/yr of CO₂.

In 2023, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry signed a letter of intent to contribute US$191m to the project, with US$34m already allocated for phase one. The remaining US$157m will be finalised through a phase two agreement to support the construction of the CCUS system and a combined heat and power (CHP) facility. The funding has been earmarked under the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and is contingent on Heidelberg Materials making its final investment decision.

“This groundbreaking partnership with Heidelberg Materials takes us one step closer to a net-zero Canada by 2050,” Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne said. “By building North America’s first carbon capture system in cement, we’re driving innovation, cutting emissions and securing a sustainable future.”

Canada: Progressive Planet has secured up to US$3.2m in funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) to support the construction of a pilot plant for PozGlass, its low-carbon supplementary cementitious material (SCM) made from post-consumer glass. The funding will be distributed over four years, with the first tranche of US$1m received on 31 January 2025.

"PozGlass is our solution to reducing the carbon footprint of cement production. This funding allows us to innovate, reduce emissions and create value from post-consumer glass, a material that has been historically misallocated and considered waste," said Progressive Planet CEO Steve Harpur.

Progressive Planet signed a purchase agreement with Lafarge Canada in June 2023 for all PozGlass produced at the pilot plant, up to a maximum of 3500t/yr. Under the agreement, Lafarge Canada will provide technical guidance and support for the plant’s design, construction and operation.