These Startups Are Solving The Hard Problem Of Decarbonizing Cement: Terra Co2 & Eco Material.
Stopping cement production would have the same effect on civilization’s carbon footprint as taking all the world’s cars off the road.
An enormous amount of cement—around four billion metric tons—is produced each year, pumping a nearly equal mass of carbon dioxide—around 3.4 billion metric tons—into the atmosphere during its manufacture.
Terra CO2 is a Colorado-based company that announced a $46 million Series A funding round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and LenX, homebuilder Lennar’s corporate VC arm, in 2022.
Terra’s management team consists of construction material industry veterans like CEO Bill Yearsley, whose vision is to produce SCM from various widely available feedstocks instead of recycled ash or steel slag, another common SCM input. Terra has said that its newest SCM will replace 100% of OPC in concrete mixtures, bringing the carbon footprint of a structure built with this material to nearly zero.
In addition to a Canadian R&D facility where Terra runs feedstock tests, it has been running a small pilot plant for about four years in Colorado, which it scaled up to a 1-ton-per-day facility in 2022.
Terra won the CleanTech Breakthrough Awards 2024 Decarbonization Solution of the Year in April, and is in the final stages of designing a 30-ton-per-hour commercial facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Yearsley believes that Terra’s high-yield process, its ability to serve as a drop-in solution for existing supply chains, and wide feedstock accessibility make it particularly attractive.