_A US tax credit for carbon storage passed in 2018 could spur retrofits of
power plants that would in turn capture 54 million tons of carbon per year
by 2030. That’s the equivalent of taking some 10 million cars off the streets.one of their machines out in the real world.
The monitors let them know if, say, a valve
gets blocked at a job site in Georgia or a tank
starts running low in Singapore.
The simplicity of its system is one of
CarbonCure’s best selling points. The con-
crete makers who are its customers don’t
have to change much for mixing and pour-
ing at a construction site—they just add a
little extra hardware. “The whole system
fits in a crate,” Niven says. “It takes a single
day to set up and it’s universally applicable
to any concrete plant in the world.” Car-
bonCure also connects clients to suppliers
of captured carbon from other dirty man-
ufacturing processes. (The company’s goal
is to someday capture carbon from cement
plants themselves.)
CarbonCure’s tech has improved steadily
over the years, and so has its profile. In
2018 the company was named one of 10
finalists for a $20 million XPrize for turn-
ing carbon into commercial products. (The
contest’s winner will be announced this
fall.) That same year, the company got
a sizable (Niven won’t say how sizable)
investment from Breakthrough Energy
Ventures, the billion-dollar fund focused
on carbon-reducing investments backed
by Bill Gates and other tech titans. The
money helps, Niven says, but the stamp
of approval is perhaps even more valu-
able. “It really meant something for the
broader investment community that that
group would say, ‘This one’s a vetted win-
ner,’” Niven says.
Today CarbonCure says that more than
200 concrete makers across North Amer-
ica and in Singapore are using its system. A
new building on LinkedIn’s Silicon Valley
campus, a stretch of road in Hawaii, and an
aquarium exhibit in Atlanta all include Car-
bonCure-treated concrete. Its technology
has been used in the making of more than
4 million cubic yards of captured-CO 2 con-
crete, saving some 64,000 tons of emis-
sions, according to the company.
But in the big picture, CarbonCure’s
impact is still pretty small. In a few cases,customers have been able to reduce their
cement use by 20 percent—but the aver-
age is closer to 5 percent.
The best news, then, may be that
CarbonCure has a growing crowd of
competitors, including three of the other
finalists for that XPrize. One rival, New
Jersey–based Solidia, uses a similar con-
cept and seems to get even better results,
but as of February, it makes only prefab-
ricated concrete blocks. (The construction
industry mostly uses concrete mixed at job
sites.) Another, Alberta’s Carbon Upcycling
Technologies, combines gaseous C0 2 with
fly ash—a waste product from coal-fired
power plants—to create nanoparticles that
can replace about 20 percent of the cement
in a concrete mixture. Cofounder and CEO
Apoorv Sinha says he hopes to eventually
double that percentage, and to start sell-
ing to his first customers this year. Mean-
while, researchers at Rice University claim
to have developed a concrete mix that pri-
marily uses fly ash as the concrete binding
agent—no cement required. Other outfits
are attacking the problem from different
angles. A group of MIT scientists and an
Australian company are developing new,
lower-emission ways to make cement
powder.
Most of these projects haven’t made it to
market. Securing funding is difficult, and
the customer can be too. The construction
industry is notoriously chary about adopt-
ing new ways. With good reason: You can’t
afford to “fail fast” or “iterate on your prod-
uct” when your product is a skyscraper or
a dam. To truly decarbonize all that con-
crete will probably take some kind of gov-
ernment help to make these methods more
commercially attractive. But CarbonCure’s
success offers a proof of concept: There’s a
concrete business case for better cement.both reducing emissions and sequestering
carbon. Not to mention saving money.
Niven and his team eventually figured
out a process that takes liquefied CO 2 (cap-
tured from places like ammonia and etha-
nol plants) and injects it into wet concrete
as it’s being mixed. The C0 2 chemically
reacts with the cement and other ingredi-
ents in the mix, remineralizing it into solid
calcium carbonate, which helps bind the
other ingredients, increases the concrete’s
compressive strength, and takes the place
of some of the cement that would otherwise
be required. And even if the concrete even-
tually gets pulverized, that carbon remains
an earthbound solid.
The company has developed a surprisingly
simple system to bring the whole process out
into the field. A tank of carbon dioxide feeds
into a pair of dorm-fridge-sized metal boxes
stuffed with valves, circuitry, and teleme-
try gear, which regulate the carbon diox-
ide’s flow into a hose, which sprays it into
the mixing drum. (The boxes are all made
by a few guys in jeans and T-shirts at the
Halifax HQ.) The tricky part is figuring out
the optimal dose of C0 2 for different mix-
tures; the strength, weight, and appearance
of concrete for an airport runway in northern
Canada are not necessarily what you want
for an office building wall in Southern Cali-
fornia. At the Halifax headquarters, Carbon-
Cure technicians keep an eye on a wall of
monitors tracking the operations of everyCAPTURE
VINCE BEISER (@VinceBeiser) is the
author of The World in a Grain: The Story
of Sand and How It Transformed Civili-
zation. His last story for WIRED,in issue
28.01, was about catfishing from prison.Simplicity is one of
the best selling points.
“The whole system
fits in a crate,” Niven
says. “It takes a single
day to set up and it’s
universally applicable
to any concrete plant
in the world.”