By Kayla Carey – Senior Manager, Industrial Innovations and Andrew Primo – Manager, Program Development at ClimeCo

As investment begins to pour into decarbonization technologies and innovative infrastructure projects sprout across the globe, the new energy economy faces a conundrum: carbon-intensive building materials. Renewable energy installations, hydrogen plants, modular reactors, and more efficient buildings will all still be built with materials like concrete and steel that rely on highly emissive manufacturing processes. These vital but emissions-heavy construction materials are members of the so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors: industries that require much greater effort (and investment) to decarbonize than simply increasing efficiency or greening the grid. This uphill climb to decarbonization is particularly salient in the manufacture of concrete, where nearly 90% of carbon emissions result from a chemical process called “calcination” that creates clinker, the key intermediate product in the manufacture of traditional portland cement.

Cement and concrete production already contributes about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions yearly. The Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) expects demand for cement to increase by nearly 50% by midcentury compared to 2020. According to the GCCA, there are multiple solutions to help decarbonize the cement sector, including improving building and infrastructure design and construction, optimizing production efficiency, and decarbonizing electricity supplies. However, there are only three pathways to reduce the process emissions released during portland cement production: reduce the percentage of portland cement in concrete, replace clinker or portland cement with alternative materials, and capture the remaining carbon dioxide emissions using carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technology.

In blended cement and concrete mix designs, producers can displace carbon-intensive clinker using supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The most used SCMs today—fly ash and ground granulated blast-furnace slag—are byproducts of legacy industrial facilities like coal-fired power plants and steel mills, whose numbers are dwindling as the power sector decarbonizes and the steel industry adopts cleaner, more efficient technologies. This combination of a drastic increase in demand in a highly emissive sector and the gradual loss of traditional emission reduction avenues makes the decarbonization of concrete and cement one of the most pressing sustainability and infrastructure challenges of the coming decades.

Some innovative decarbonization efforts exist, including the production of new alternative cement and innovative SCMs, and the advancement of CCUS technologies. Still, most of these projects are in the early stages of development and face significant financial barriers to scaling. This makes low-carbon cement an ideal candidate for investment via the voluntary carbon market (VCM). One of the fundamental goals of the VCM is to direct financing to sectors, like cement, that otherwise lack substantial political and institutional incentives to decarbonize. Fortunately, there are emerging opportunities in the VCM for carbon finance to reduce process emissions in the upstream building industry while making low-carbon products more economical.

To effectively leverage the carbon market, low-carbon cement and technology producers must first have faith in that market and understand how they can contribute to its growing capacity. Despite ongoing efforts to bolster credibility, the VCM is plagued with significant obstacles that may prevent growth and participation. Some of the core challenges hindering market participation are general mistrust and uncertainty about the seemingly complex crediting process.

If carefully constructed with rigor and usability in mind, industrial VCM protocols can be designed to incentivize innovation beyond business as usual, permanently reduce emissions, and accurately quantify avoided emissions. All stakeholders must be aware and active in building a robust, transparent, and accessible market:

• Registries and verifiers – engage hard-to-abate industries early in the protocol development process, continue to grow technical expertise in hard-to-abate sectors, develop robust and usable protocols through a transparent process, and identify additional industrial activities which may meet carbon credit principles and be well-suited for carbon finance.
• Project developers – help new and potential VCM participants understand their role in the market, engage in developing high-quality protocols that meet carbon credit principles, streamline project management, and invest in high-quality reduction and removal projects.
• Alternative cement and low-carbon technology companies – work with well-respected registries and project developers to create crediting projects and identify decarbonization activities that may lack other incentives and could be appropriate for carbon finance.
• Credit buyers – decarbonize internally first but use high-quality avoidance and removal credits to address hard-to-abate emissions.

The VCM can be an effective tool to advance innovation and decarbonize the cement industry. Still, protocols must be robust, transparent, and accessible to effectively direct much-needed funds to the sector and bring high-quality carbon avoidance credits to market.

Any opinions published in this commentary reflect the views of the author and not of Carbon Pulse.