New Jersey startup Queens Carbon has received a $14.5 million grant from a wing of the U.S. Department of Energy to finance its work to decarbonize cement production.
The company will use the money to pilot its new low-temperature, zero carbon dioxide (CO2) technology in partnership with an unnamed commercial cement producer. The funding comes from DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) and its Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy Technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP).
“Through SCALEUP, Queens Carbon will build on prior work funded by ARPA-E and develop an integrated pilot facility at an existing cement production site to produce carbon-neutral materials in support of decarbonizing cement production,” said ARPA-E Director, Evelyn N. Wang, in a statement.
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Decarbonization Work in the Global Cement and Concrete Industries
Queens Carbon is trying to develop an energy-efficient approach to produce carbon-neutral supplemental cementitious materials (SCM) from industry standard raw materials to enable an unlimited SCM supply for an increasingly urbanized world.
The company’s Q-SCMs are used to replace 20-50 percent of the high-CO2 binder used to produce cement. The approach will meet the challenges of increasing demand for cement with a scalable source of SCMs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of cement and concrete products while remaining cost competitive.
Queens Carbon plans to deploy a pilot plant capable of producing 10 tons of SCMs daily.
The Global Cement and Concrete Association has started work on decarbonizing the industry, which accounts for close to 7% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. These add to billions of metric tons in CO2 emissions from cement production and installation annually, according to reports.
Concrete is the most used building material in most construction projects, according to reports.
