💚 🏭 How can carbon dioxide removal (hashtag#CDR) help clean up one of the world’s dirtiest industries? 🏭💚

🤯 Cement accounts for 8% of global emissions. We produce a staggering 4,000,000,000 tons of it every year, making it the most widely used human-made material in the world.

👷 Last week I gathered with industry leaders in Madrid as part of the 2024 hashtag#CarbonZero conference to better understand where the industry stands and what role CDR can play in decarbonising it.

It was so refreshing to attend an event where I did not know anyone, and where almost no one had heard of CDR. Here my key takeaways:

📈 Demand for cement is only going up, all over the world, particularly driven by the demand for AI data centers, which are huge concrete constructions popping up everywhere.

😱 The sector is already highly regulated by emission trading systems (hashtag#ETS). There was visible shock and anger at projections of the EU ETS price going from currently €70/t to around €150/t in 2030, €250 in 2035, and up to €400/t in 2040. CDR at €150-€200/t could be a competitive game changer to stabilise prices in this regard.

⚠️ Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is insanely expensive, almost doubling the CAPEX cost of a new facility at $400m/unit. It seems like there won’t be a business case for it in cement production for a while.

💩 Biochar carbon removal (hashtag#BCR) was seen as the biggest opportunity, given the massive amounts of waste biomass available in some of these supply chains. In Pakistan alone, I was told there are over 500Mt of manure waste / year - what an opportunity for BCR!

🛑 The Global South will be hit hardest by increased carbon taxes/prices. Countries such as Turkey (the world’s largest exporter of cement) might be unable to cope with carbon import taxes rising by 4-10x. While carbon taxes are the way forward, we need to plan for negative externalities on some of the world’s most vulnerable.

➡ Overall, it became very clear to me that the sector can only do so much to decarbonise. There will be significant residual emissions. Cement companies risk losing both their social license to operate and their business case if they do not embrace CDR soon.

🌟 I personally gave an intro into CDR, the market and policy, as well as highlighting the important work done by Carbonfuture, Paebbl, neustark, and ecoLocked as great examples of partners for this industry.

🙏 Special thanks to the Industry Link team around Beatrice Ene, Mai Elsomkhraty, Lobna Maged, Eyad Alenani, and Adrian Ene for putting this event together - I had learnt a lot!

What is your take? How can and will the cement industry decarbonise?

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