Sublime Systems, a Boston-based business, has secured $40 million to create low-carbon cement using ground-breaking technology.
Cement production accounts for up to 8% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, which warm the globe. In order to achieve the Paris Agreement's global climate goals, it would need to be reduced to zero within a few decades.
However, because creating low-carbon cement using the current technologies is significantly more expensive than producing the traditional counterpart, cement has emerged as one of the more challenging industries to clean up. The fact that cement emissions come from more than just the burning of fossil fuels during manufacture presents another significant challenge.
Carbon Emissions & Energy Consumption Reduction
Building carbon-capture units, which capture carbon dioxide discharged from their plants before it enters the environment, is the approach that has attracted the most support from large cement businesses looking to decrease emissions. The procedure, though, can cost more than twice as much as the final product and is energy-intensive.
Sublime claims to have developed a method that reduces carbon emissions as well as energy consumption. The approach taken by Sublime entails dividing the production of cement into two phases, and the end product will be a blend of reactive silicon and reactive calcium. The chemical reaction starts when you add water and gravel, which causes the material to start to harden into concrete. The hardened cement reportedly meets or exceeds industry requirements, according to Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime.
Professor of materials at Carnegie Mellon University Venkat Viswanathan, the brains behind another electric-powered cement business, adds, "It's a novel approach." Exactly how much less energy is being used is unclear.
100 tons of this low-carbon cement are currently produced by Sublime in a small facility. Depending on how well it does in extracting reactive silicon from nature, it will use some of the $40 million raised to scale that up to as much as 40,000 tons annually by 2025. Chiang states that Scaling the Synthetic Reactive Silicon Production Process is being worked on by Sublime in the interim. It will take time, but Sublime hopes to have a plant operating at a commercial scale by 2028. Chiang claims that Roman cement serves as evidence of the viability of Sublime's technology. Hydraulic cement is very strong and long-lasting.
A CSR Initiative of
Designed and Executed by
Implemented by
Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master, it was rightly said. Electronic devices have grown into an inevitable part of our daily lives.
