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European countries have been actively implementing new low-carbon cement technologies across multiple countries for years, while the US is just starting to experiment. For example, Ecocem, Europe’ s leading provider of low-carbon cement technologies, has been deploying low-carbon cement used in a range of major European infrastructure projects from Le Grand Paris Express to Dublin’ s Aviva Stadium, the UK’ s high-speed railway HS2 and the athletes’ village in Paris. Using this low-carbon technology, Ecocem has prevented almost 18 million tons of CO 2 emissions.
While just beginning to scratch the surface, there’ s an opportunity for US construction companies to also adopt lowcarbon cement technologies to create a competitive advantage. The global business community increasingly demands lowcarbon solutions for managing their carbon footprint, and next-generation cement can meet these demands without additional costs or operational changes.
Leveraging readily available materials to reduce energy use and emissions
One of the most significant opportunities for cutting emissions in cement manufacturing is reducing reliance on clinker, which accounts for 90 percent of its emissions. The use of Supplementary Cementitious Materials( SCMs) also reduces the amount of energy required in cement production, contributing to lower
CO 2 emissions and operating costs. As the Rocky Mountain Institute points out, cement and concrete producers can use a variety of SCMs to replace clinker and lower embodied carbon while still crucially meeting specifications. Historically, these SCMs have included:
■ waste or by-product pozzolans, such as fly ash and ground glass, which are mostly silica,
■ natural pozzolans, such as volcanic ash, which perform similarly to waste pozzolans, and
■ ground granulated blast furnace slag( GGBFS), a by-product of steelmaking that contains calcium and silica and that can almost entirely replace Portland cement.
Alternatively, the most-used clinker substitute in Ecocem’ s ACT technology is limestone, one of the world’ s most abundant materials, making wide-scale adoption across North America not only feasible, but easy. With the US already somewhat familiar with SCMs, the industry has a foundation for wider adoption of low-carbon cement without major disruptions to manufacturing plants or construction processes. It’ s worth noting that while this alters the composition of the cement, alternative low-carbon options can provide the same strength and performance as traditional cement.
Maintaining cost-competitiveness and high-performance
Industries can face a‘ green premium’ when adopting sustainable solutions. However, lowcarbon cement developed with SCMs is an exception- it is cost-competitive and, in some cases, even cheaper than traditional Portland cement, according to The Rocky Mountain Institute. Research has demonstrated that SCMs can lower costs in multiple ways. They are often cheaper than traditional clinker, especially in areas where they are locally available and they improve workability and durability, reducing the total cement required in construction projects. And, in the same way that SCMs offer performance benefits through efficiency, this translates to lower material costs because it requires less energy to produce when compared with the same volume of clinker. To understand how this would look in practice, Ecocem’ s ACT technology uses existing resources more efficiently and can do more with less,
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