CarbonCure – decarbonizing the concrete industry

Dominique Barker: Welcome to The Sustainability Agenda, a podcast series focusing on the evolving complexities of the sustainability landscape with a view on addressing current issues in a concise format to help you navigate and take action. I’m your host, Dominique Barker. Please join me as we explore today’s most pressing matters with special guests that will give you some new perspective and help you make sense of what really matters.

Robert Niven: The nice thing about Carbon Cure is that we can become a really helpful demand signal being those first buyers for any atmospheric CO2, so we can accelerate the development of the atmospheric CO2 industry, so that carbon removal technologies can scale up far faster than they normally would.

Dominique Barker: Dominique Barker: Welcome to the third episode in our Carbon series. We’re really excited to welcome Rob Niven. He’s chair and CEO of Carbon Cure. Concrete shapes the built environment around us. It’s the most abundant human made material and most resilient building material in the world. However, cement, the key ingredient that gives concrete its strength is also one of the largest emitters of CO2. But because of all that concrete and carbon intensive cement used to make it, buildings and construction are the source of some 40% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonizing the concrete industry is critical to achieving global climate objectives and Carbon Cure is a pioneer in the space with a portfolio of carbon mineralization technologies to make concrete more green by using less cement in each mix. Big picture, Carbon Cure’s mission is to reduce 500 million metric tonnes of CO2 from the built environment annually by 2030, and their goal is to do that profitably. Most recently, Carbon Cure was named a 2022 Global Cleantech 100 company for a seventh consecutive year and was awarded the special honour of being inducted to the Global Cleantech 100 Hall of Fame. Good morning, Rob, and thank you for joining us on The Sustainability Agenda and of course, congratulations on all of your recent success.

Robert Niven: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dominique Barker: So maybe we can just start with a bit of an overview for our audience, which we always typically like to do. If you could just talk about what Carbon Cure does and the technologies it has developed, and maybe you can also, I happen to be a civil engineer, and so I understand the difference between concrete and cement, but I think most of our listeners don’t. So maybe you could spend a bit of time on that as well.

Robert Niven: Oh, great. Well, it’s always fantastic to speak to another civil engineer. So Carbon Cure is a Halifax based carbon removal technology company. What that means is that we’ve developed technologies that beneficially use carbon dioxide in the production of concrete. What I mean by that is that we use CO2 to in a variety of different ways, such as injecting it into concrete as it’s being batched. When that CO2 is added into the process, it actually allows a chemical reaction to occur where that CO2 is permanently turned into a mineral or it’s mineralized, thereby avoiding it from being released into the atmosphere. The best part is that when that CO2 is mineralized, it actually improves the quality and the economics of making concrete. So thereby you’re able to not only reduce your carbon footprint of concrete, but also improve your business. And this is a technology that is becoming very widely adopted across the concrete industry, not only in North America, but now more and more so overseas. We have about over 500 installation sites worldwide.

Dominique Barker: Great. And the cement versus concrete. So the cement is the small, think about the small particles right, versus the concrete, which would include aggregate and is the actual what goes into the building materials. So maybe you can talk about the challenges that are presented by the global concrete industry from a carbon perspective and how Carbon Cure plans to address it?

Robert Niven: Yeah. First off, just to clarify the difference between cement and concrete, as you said, is really cement is the reactive agent in concrete. A great analogy to think about is it would be the flour in baking a cake. It is sort of that reactive ingredient that gives concrete its form and holds all the aggregates together. Now, as far as the CO2 impact of the built environment, you mentioned earlier that there was a 40 percent contribution for the built environment of total greenhouse gas emissions. And that’s a really important point to note. If you dive down a little bit deeper, you’ll also realize that there are two main sources of emissions from the built environment. One half is related to operational emissions, so that’s the energy use of buildings throughout its lifetime. But half of the emissions of the built environment actually occur before the first individual or occupant ever enters into that building. And this is what’s called the embodied CO2 emissions, and these are all of the emissions that are released from the materials that are produced for that building and also the construction phase. And typically the largest contributor to those embodied emissions is concrete. So really, this is the big problem that we’re working on right now, is to work with this great material, concrete, but actually improve its sustainability so that we can take advantage of all of its other benefits, but also reduce the embodied CO2 of buildings by decarbonizing concrete.

Dominique Barker: Great. And this is your chance to sell to your customers, what is your value proposition to concrete producers, what products do you currently offer and what’s in the pipeline?

Robert Niven: Well, Carbon Cure is most known for its ready mix technology. This is a retrofit solution that takes about a day to retrofit any concrete plant, and what that allows the concrete producer to do is actually lower their carbon footprint and lower their costs by using less cement for each unit of concrete that’s produced and sent to job sites. We’re expanding on that portfolio of hardware solutions by providing other technologies that use CO2 to treat, in these cases, the waste streams from concrete so that they can be reused in new concrete production. This is already reclaimed water technology and soon our recycled concrete aggregate technology. These technologies will provide deeper carbon reductions, but also allow concrete producers to gain these economic benefits. But we realize there’s a lot of other great tools that we’ve developed that can help concrete producers improve both their economics and sustainability. And we’ve made a lot of investment into digital technologies and also creating solutions for concrete producers to tap into the really exciting space of the voluntary carbon market. And both of these, coupled with our hardware solutions, provide concrete producers with a fully integrated software and hardware solution package to help them decarbonize and improve the profitability of their businesses.

Dominique Barker: Ok, let’s talk about where Carbon Cure customers actually source their CO2. Previously, I believe in the early days you were sourcing from big chemical companies such as Air Liquide to prove out the technology, but not sure how is this done now, particularly given that they’re on six continents longer term, would Carbon Cure source on a centralized basis to give yourselves buying power in the market and then sell to the concrete producers? Or what’s the solution there?

Robert Niven: Most people are not aware that there’s already a very large commodity marketplace for CO2. Co2 is regularly captured from large emitters such as ethanol plants, ammonia plants, refineries by companies like those that you mentioned, like Air Liquide and Linde are the two main companies in this business. They supply CO2 typically to the food and beverage industry and now concrete. So this is all post-industrial CO2 that would normally be released into the atmosphere and now can be used for applications like concrete. And this continues to be the main source of CO2 that our customers, concrete producers use to run the technology that we provide them with. We’re always exploring other ways to be able to improve the sustainability and the efficiency of our technology, and that may in time look at other sources of CO2. But today it’s a very reliable and an abundant source of CO2 that we’re able to tap into. So a lot of conversation happening right now about carbon removal and looking at other sources of CO2 that can actually reverse climate change by using atmospheric CO2. As this space continues to develop, we’ll continue to monitor it while it’s going through this development phase. The nice thing about Carbon Cure is that we can become a really helpful demand signal being those first buyers for any atmospheric CO2, so we can accelerate the development of the atmospheric CO2 industry, so that carbon removal technologies can scale up far faster than they normally would by providing those first buyers or early market.

Dominique Barker: Great. That is certainly the dream. I hope people appreciate that this is a really novel technology. Can we talk about carbon credits produced through the use of Carbon Cure’s technologies? How are you using digitization, which is, you know, really the future of scaling the markets? How are you using that MRV for measurement, reporting and verification to do this work?

Robert Niven: Yeah, I’d be happy to talk about that. It’s a really exciting area of our business. I mentioned earlier that we’re making a lot of investments to developing digital technologies, and this is an area where there’s still so much opportunity in the cement and concrete industry. So one of the first products that we developed in the technology side was to collect all of the relevant GHG reporting data from concrete plants and pull that into the cloud. One of our main investors is Amazon, and everyone is familiar with their cloud services, AWS. So we’re able to work closely with AWS, really accelerate our development of some of these digital technologies. Digital has allowed us to be able to create a very efficient and real time platform to not only report but actually convert these emission reductions into tangible, fungible carbon credits that can be sold on the voluntary carbon removal credit marketplace. So not only does it allow us to be able to very efficiently report and then create these credits, but it provides this traceability or verification or audit ability that all buyers right now are really looking for so that they can actually ensure that it’s a very high quality credit that we’re providing. So that’s part of the MRV story on how technology coupled with hardware are able to tap into some very exciting market opportunities where we’re able to then sell these credits and create new revenue streams for concrete producers that we work with to really accelerate their transition into low carbon production. I should also mention the kinds of credits that we’re creating are carbon removal credits, which are permanent and engineered, which are really important topics right now. As we think about credits, we should be thinking about how long is that climate impact in really having a climate reduction that may occur for 30 days if it’s a temporary reduction, is a very different thing and something like Carbon Cure, where the climate impact is hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Dominique Barker: Great lead in to my last question, which is on the development of carbon credit markets more broadly. And if you could discuss quality of credits, so you mentioned permanence and you talked about removal versus reduction, but maybe you can also speak about additionality and then how should that be reflected in pricing?

Robert Niven: I think right now it’s a watershed moment in the voluntary carbon market space, and fortunately, Canadians are actually in a real leading position, and I would certainly include CIBC in that and some of the work that you and your team are doing with carbon markets right now. And we’re also very active in this space, as well as the largest seller of engineered permanent carbon removal credits. So you mentioned the word quality, and that’s sort of the big point here. Right now, a lot of the voluntary carbon offset market has a lot of skepticism about additionality. And what that means is that there has been a great deal of carbon credits that have been generated, where now we’re looking back at these and realizing that they didn’t really actually have the impact that they were sold, which is very important because they’re allowing for an emission to occur and they have to provide that full ton of reduction. So if they’re starting to become doubt and some of the existing carbon markets, there’s really a reform movement that’s going on right now where we’re emphasizing quality amongst all other things, but also looking to go beyond that by thinking about actually, how can the voluntary carbon market reverse climate change and actually use atmospheric CO2 and permanently lock that away? So in a way, we’re actually reversing climate change. This is what’s called carbon removals. This is a very clear distinction right now in a very high demand form of carbon credit right now that Carbon Cure is participating in and we’re seeing a lot of interesting discussions and reforms in the carbon market, according to a shift towards quality, carbon removal and permanence.

Dominique Barker: Well, that’s terrific. And as you know, our mission and our dream with Carbon Place is to really incent more carbon removal and you’re going to play a really important role with that. And I just hope that for those Canadians listening, it’s exactly right, we’ve got some great Canadian technologies and this is one of them in Canada that’s got some global eyes on it. And Canada has a real opportunity to, what I call reverse mining or to take that carbon out of the year, as you say, and sequestered away either in the ground or in the built environment through Carbon Cure. Rob, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it and look forward to hearing more about Carbon Cure.

Robert Niven: Thank you so much, Dominique. It was a pleasure to be here and have this chance to speak.

Dominique Barker: Please join us next time as we tackle some of sustainability’s biggest questions providing different perspectives to help you move forward. I’m your host, Dominique Barker, and this is The Sustainability Agenda.

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