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    Cement Decarbonization Startup Queens Carbon Gains $14.5M ARPA-E Grant to Fund Pilot Project

    June 28, 2024
    Queens Carbon plans to deploy a pilot plant capable of producing 10 tons of carbon-neutral supplemental cementitious materials daily
    Image credit U.S. Department of Defense concrete project/courtesy Wikimedia Commons
    667ee4b38505d8803a77625e Cement Production

    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.

    See EnergyTech's Full Coverage

    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.

     

     

    About the Author

    Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor | Senior Editor

    For EnergyTech editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].

    Rod Walton has spent 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. He formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.

    Walton earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. His career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World. 

    EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

    He was named Managing Editor for Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech starting July 1, 2023

    Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.

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