Displaying items by tag: carbon capture

Canada: Ash Grove, part of CRH, and Carbon Upcycling Technologies have broken ground on a carbon capture and utilisation unit at the Mississauga cement plant in Ontario. The project will use Carbon Upcycling's technology to sequester CO₂ from the cement kiln and use it to turn industrial byproducts into supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). Once operational in 2026, the facility will have the capacity to produce up to 30,000t/yr of SCMs.

"Carbon 1 Mississauga is a milestone in our journey to build world-leading, domestic supply chains in North America. It will stand as a testament to the shared commitment of our team, our partners at CRH and Ash Grove, and the local community who share our vision for a resilient, clean tomorrow,” said Apoorv Sinha, CEO of Carbon Upcycling.

The Carbon 1 Mississauga project is being delivered through a multi-stakeholder collaboration. CRH Ventures, the venture capital unit of CRH, has invested in Carbon Upcycling and is playing a role in scaling the company's technology. The project has been awarded around US$7m in federal government funding from the Next Generation Manufacturing's Sustainable Manufacturing Program, the Environment and Climate Change Canada's Low-Carbon Economy Fund and is receiving advisory services and funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program.

India: Tamil Nadu will host one of five national carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) testbeds aimed at lowering CO₂ emissions in the cement sector in a step towards the country’s 2070 net-zero target, according to The New Indian Express newspaper. The testbed will be located at UltraTech Cement’s Reddipalayam plant in Ariyalur district, supported by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani. The project is part of a Department of Science and Technology (DST) programme, which will trial an oxygen-enriched kiln system capturing up to 2t/day of CO₂ for mineralisation into concrete products. Other CCU testbeds are being established in Rajasthan, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, with JK Cement and Dalmia Cement involved.

Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh said the DST was currently processing financial sanctions for the projects, and full-scale implementation is expected in 2025.

Germany: CI4C has installed the final modular component of its carbon purification unit (CPU) at the Schwenk Zement plant in Mergelstetten. The unit is 31m long with a cross-section of 5 x 5m, installed using a tandem lift.

The unit completes major construction work at the CO₂ capture pilot project. The CPU will clean and liquefy CO₂-rich exhaust gas from the oxyfuel kiln and processes it to food-grade quality, enabling its reuse in purified form. Final mechanical and electrical works are underway ahead of commissioning in late summer 2025.

European cement producers Buzzi, Dyckerhoff, Heidelberg Materials, Schwenk Zement and Vicat established CI4C in 2019 to implement the catch4climate initiative. The 450t/day clinker line and CPU have been purpose-built at the plant, which has received investment of over €120m, and will be used solely for research and development.

UK/Norway: UK-based marine carbon capture firm Seabound has launched an onboard carbon capture project in partnership with Hartmann Group, InterMaritime Group and Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe. The solution equips the UBC Cork, a 5700 gross tonne cement carrier, with Seabound’s calcium looping carbon capture system. This system captures up to 95% of CO₂ and 98% of sulphur emissions from the ship’s exhaust using calcium hydroxide to absorb the CO₂ and convert it into limestone that is stored onboard until returning to port. The captured carbon will be offloaded at the Port of Brevik for use at Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik cement plant, host of the first industrial-scale carbon capture facility in the cement sector.

The project is co-funded by the Eurostars partnership on Innovative SMEs, part of Horizon Europe through the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation. This funding supports collaborative research and development projects in a range of industries, including maritime transport.

CEO of Seabound Alisha Fredriksson said “We’re proud to partner with industry leaders like Heidelberg Materials and Hartmann to deliver scalable carbon capture solutions. We’re especially excited to be advancing this work in Brevik, a strategic location that’s rapidly establishing itself as a global hub for CCS with Heidelberg’s world-first facility and the Northern Lights pick up point. Together, we’re demonstrating how onboard carbon capture can accelerate emissions reductions in carbon-intensive sectors.”

Lars Erik Marcussen, Logistics project manager at Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe, said “Shipping cement is emissions-intensive, and Seabound’s system gives us a clear path to reduce those Scope 3 emissions while enhancing our circular use of captured CO₂. This project also brings us one step closer to decarbonising the logistics/transport part of our operations.”

UK: Holcim UK has welcomed a €33.1m investment by the National Wealth Fund into the Peak Cluster carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, which will decarbonise 40% of the UK’s cement and lime production and support over 2000 existing jobs, as well as creating new ones. Led by Progressive Energy, Peak Cluster is a partnership between Holcim UK, Breedon, Tarmac and Sigma Roc involving cement and lime plants in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, including Holcim UK’s 1Mt/yr Cauldon plant. The project aims to reduce annual carbon emissions from its partners by 3Mt/yr from 2032 (25% of annual CO₂ output for the area), by capturing CO₂ from the plants and transporting it by pipeline to Morecambe Net Zero's disused gas fields under the East Irish Sea.

The investment will fund front-end engineering and design (FEED) and other studies to support a final investment decision in 2028. Holcim UK CEO Lee Sleight said that CCS is ‘essential’ to decarbonise cement manufacturing and achieve net zero by 2050.

Peak Cluster CEO John Egan said it will create a ‘backbone of industrial opportunity’ across northern England.

It’s not every week that a ‘new’ cement producer gains hold of nearly 30Mt/yr of production capacity.¹ Back in 2022, a few readers studying the North America pages of the year’s Global Cement Directory probably wondered “Where’s Lafarge gone?” following the dissolution of the France-based producer’s corporate identity into Holcim in June 2021. Now, in the upcoming Global Cement Directory 2026, readers will be able to search in vain for another name among the cement maps of Canada and the US – that of Holcim itself. A decade on from the completion of the Lafarge/Holcim merger, the combination of the two in North America has precipitated something entirely new: Amrize.

On 23 June 2025, Amrize assumed the entire business of Canada and US market leader Holcim North America, following its successful spin-off from Switzerland-based Holcim. Amrize occupies its predecessor’s operational headquarters in Chicago, US, with registered offices in Zug, Switzerland, and is dual-listed in the US and Switzerland.² For those interested in finance, shares in Amrize debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in the US at US$50. Meanwhile on the SIX Swiss Exchange, they dropped by 13% from reference price, to US$49.30, while those in its erstwhile parent rose by 14%.

Table 1 (below) gives the relative size of the entities, based on their latest published figures and the Global Cement Directory 2025. Amrize and Holcims’ respective percentages of the former Holcim total are given in brackets:

Metric                                     Amrize                        Rump Holcim            TOTAL

Integrated cement plants     18 (17%)                     88 (83%)                     106

Capacity                                 28.7Mt/yr (11%)          224.9Mt/yr (89%)        253.6Mt/yr

Employees                             19,000 (29%)              46,000 (71%)              65,000                        

Revenues                               US$7.85bn (24%)       US$24.95 (76%)         US$32.8bn

Amrize chair and CEO Jan Jenisch stated the company’s aims in a post to LinkedIn: to be partner of choice for the US$2tn/yr North American construction sector, to deliver ‘advanced’ materials ‘from foundation to rooftop’ and to serve customers in every province and state.³ This paraphrases Amrize’s Five Strategic Drivers: 100% North America focus; unparalleled footprint and resources; value creation; unlocking growth and driving shareholder value. The menu on the company website offers not ‘products,’ but ‘solutions,’ categorised by type of construction. For cement, users can navigate to Our Businesses > Building Materials > Cement.⁴ Behind this new messaging, the Canadians and Americans who rely on Amrize’s cement business might like to know what exact role cement will play.

Holcim’s global cement revenues first fell below 50% of group sales in 2024, at US$16.4bn (49%). In North America, its recent acquisitions include both those within the cement value chain (British-Columbia based Langley Concrete Group in June 2025) and outside it (OX Engineered Products in November 2024).

Amrize is organised into Building Materials (cement, concrete, aggregates and asphalt) and Building Envelope (insulation, roofing, sealants and weatherproofing). It operates in five regions: Central (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and inland US west of the Mississippi, from Missouri to Nevada northward), Great Lakes (Ontario and the US Midwest), Northeast (Quebec, Nova Scotia and the eastern US from Maryland northward), Pacific (British Columbia, California, Oregon and Washington) and South (southern US, west to Arizona, and Ohio).

Setting aside its extensive grinding and logistics infrastructure, the geographical footprint of North America’s largest cement producer breaks down as follows:

Region            Integrated cement plants     Capacity

Central           4                                              9.8

South              5                                              7.6

Northeast       5                                              5.5

Great Lakes   3                                              4.7

Pacific            1                                              1.1

TOTAL            18                                            28.7

Four of these geographies – all except South – are transnational. This at a time when Canada and the US are diverging in industrial policy and engaged in a trade war… Supposedly, regional directors will be juggling ambitious projects like Amrize’s on-going Bath, Ontario, and Richmond, British Columbia, carbon capture projects in Canada with a complement of lower-cost strategies in the US.

Just as important for the future of the company is the team in charge. Leadership is structured similarly to Holcim, with some names even reprising the same role. Chair and CEO Jan Jenisch previously chaired Holcim from May 2023, and was its CEO between September 2023 and April 2024. Jenisch first joined Holcim from Switzerland-based Sika, where he had been CEO, in 2017. He obtained his Master’s of Business Administration degree from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, though Jenisch is in fact a German national.

Ian Johnston steps into the Amrize chief financial officer (CFO) position. A long-time Lafarge and Holcim mover in North America, he holds an accountancy degree from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Building Materials division president Jaime Hill came up through the Holcim corporate structure in the group’s Latin America region, including stints as CEO of Holcim Colombia in 2015 – 2019 and Holcim Mexico in 2019 – 2024, before entering the North American region as regional head in September 2024. However, his familiarity with the region goes back to his completion of a bachelor’s in Business Administration, Management and Marketing at Georgetown University in Washington, US.

Nollaig Forrest was Holcim’s chief sustainability officer (CSO) in September 2023 – June 2025; Amrize doesn’t have one. Instead, Forrest moves across to the chief marketing and corporate affairs officer spot. It’s possible that her intended role had a larger sustainability component during planning in 2024, that might have been struck off after US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the Paris Accords and suspended, then withdrew, new decarbonisation funding. If this is correct, then Amrize may be giving strategic primacy to the larger US over Canada. Whatever the case, its enormous undertakings towards reaching net zero in Canada do not appear to have a dedicated champion on the leadership team. Forrest is another European, and brings leadership experience at chemicals companies Firmenich, Dow and Dupont and the World Economic Forum, grounded in a master’s in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute in her home country of Switzerland.

Also of interest is Patrick Cleary, who steps up as senior vice president commercial cement for the US, and previously worked with Holcim US and LafargeHolcim US in Chicago. Only cement has a dedicated commercial director at this level, and then only in the US. Meanwhile, Samuel Poletti will serve as chief strategy and mergers and acquisitions. He was previously Holcim’s head of mergers and acquisitions since July 2018, before which time he was high up in the group’s South Asia subregion, including serving as Ambuja Cements’ head of strategy and commercial development in India. Poletti, presumably, will be responsible for sustaining the inorganic growth of the Holcim North America era. The flip side of this strategy for Holcim was flash market exits, including from Brazil, Zimbabwe and India in 2022. Insofar as there is a pattern to Holcim’s geographical realignment, it may be towards growth in ‘mature markets’ – a description to which all of Amrize’s regions conform. Ultimately, Amrize is a whole different company to Holcim. Whatever strategy the team is going in with, there is likely to be a transition phase and time needed to feel things out.

Overall, the Amrize leadership displays a thorough grounding in the Holcim way of doing things and a record of responsibility in a variety of its markets. Above them sits the board, with Nicholas Gangestad beside chair Jan Jenisch as lead independent director. Amrize’s 10-seat board includes four (40%) women: Theresa Drew, Holli Ladhani, Katja Roth Pellanda and Maria Cristina Wilbur.

Amrize has arisen. What makes the spin-off so interesting, besides its unprecedented scale, is the strangeness of the market into which it emerges. Spin-off plans went public in January 2024, at a time when the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were set to unleash over US$1.9tn in additional public spending into the medium-term future. This is not now going to happen. Yet Amrize’s new website proclaims that “The US and Canada are modernising their infrastructure” for ‘greater efficiency and resilience.’ Of course, building materials consumption will continue in other forms, but the level of visibility is less than ideal. One of Holcim’s partner start-ups, Sublime Systems, appeared on a government list on 30 May 2025 and lost US$87m funding at a stroke.

As for Holcim, it enters the second half of the 2020s in a different shape to that in which it began the decade. Only the geographical signature of its North and West African and Latin American subsidiaries (as well as in Bangladesh and the Philippines) confirm this European producer as having once been the closest thing ever to a global cement hegemon. Holcim’s Latin American holdings look distinctly peripheral without the multi-megatonne bookends of Holcim Brazil and, now, Holcim US.

Amrize inherits an environmental, social and governance (ESG) apparatus from Holcim that suits Canada but is now inappropriate for the US. It has chosen to strip out sustainability from its corporate structure, messaging and Strategic Drivers. The wisdom of this decision can only be measured in the longer term. On the other hand, Amrize’s efforts to mitigate its impacts may continue quietly, in a kind of reverse greenwashing – ‘brownwashing’? – until political conditions are suitable to emphasise them once again.

References

1. Global Cement Directory 2025, www.globalcement.com/directory

2. Amrize, ‘Contact Us,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/contact-us.html

3. Jan Jenisch, post to LinkedIn, 23 June 2025, www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7342995000399421440/

4. Amrize, ‘Our Cement,’ accessed 25 June 2025, www.amrize.com/us/en/our-businesses/building-materials/cement.html

Canada: Carbon Upcycling Technologies closed a US$18m investment round led by Builders Vision to support its carbon capture and utilisation project at the Ash Grove Mississauga cement plant and with Titan Group at two of its facilities. Strategic investors CRH Ventures, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Titan Group participated in the round.

Carbon Upcycling CEO Apoorv Sinha said “Builders Vision's investment, along with the continued support of our partners, is a powerful signal that the market is ready for scalable, science-based solutions like Carbon Upcycling. With the support of Builders Vision and our strategic partners, we are setting the foundation for low-carbon construction.”

They’ve done it! Best wishes are due to the Heidelberg Materials Norcem Brevik cement plant and everyone else involved. Today it has officially inaugurated its carbon capture and storage unit. The world’s first full-scale carbon capture facility in the cement industry is live.

The launch of the Longship project has been a two-day affair in Norway hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Energy, Heidelberg Materials, Northern Lights and other stakeholders. Tuesday 17 June 2025 saw assorted speakers across government and industry, including Heidelberg Materials’ CEO Dominik von Achten, talk about net zero, carbon capture, CO₂ markets and more at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet in Oslo. Then the event moved to the Brevik cement plant, today on Wednesday 18 June 2025, to inaugurate the project led by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. Our editorial director Robert McCaffrey has been in attendance and a full write-up will be available in the September 2025 issue of Global Cement Magazine.

Completing the CCS project at Brevik is undeniably a major achievement. Heidelberg Materials in Norway started seriously thinking about carbon capture in the 2000s and then tested four different potential carbon capture technologies at Brevik in the 2010s. A feasibility study, concept study and a FEED study followed for the use of an amine technology approach. A full-scale capture unit on one of the plant’s two production lines was then approved for funding partly by the Norwegian government in late 2020. Technically this is a gross simplification because the project team at Brevik have worked through the technical challenges of connecting a cement production environment to a petrochemical one. 400,00t/yr of CO₂ has started to be captured at Brevik and transported by ship, as part of the Northern Lights project, for sequestration under the North Sea. Heidelberg Materials then intends to sell a net-zero cement product via carbon capture around Europe called EvoZero using a carbon accounting system to manage it. When Global Cement asked about plans for EvoZero, Von Achten said production of the product is fully sold-out for 2025. “Customers are not the issue,” said von Achten. “Property developers and architects are leading the discussion on the use of EvoZero.” The age of commercially-available cement made using carbon capture has begun.

The Norwegian government estimates that the entire Longship project will cost around Euro2.6bn with Euro1.8bn attributable to the state. The original white paper proposed to the Norwegian parliament estimated that the Norcem project would cost just under Euro400m for construction and 10-years of operation. 84% of this would be paid for by state aid. Northern Lights, the CO₂ transport and storage part of Longship, had an estimated cost of Euro1.2bn, with 73% of this funding attributable to the state. Heidelberg Materials acknowledged the scale of the government grant funding it received in its 2024 financial report. It received Euro110m in government grants in 2024 with Euro77m for the Brevik project and a further Euro21m for a carbon capture, utilisation and storage project in Edmonton, Canada.

As discussed recently in Global Cement Weekly in response to the US government cutting funding for cement carbon capture projects, net zero is a deeply political issue because governments either have to pay for it directly, set-up incentives such as carbon taxes to encourage society to pay for it or ignore it and cope with the consequences. European policy is encouraging these projects so far. However, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere in the world. And governments can change their minds. The rough figures shown above about the cost of Brevik’s carbon capture unit and the costs of moving the CO₂ onwards show how expensive this is.

From here it’s all about building experience on how running an industrial-scale carbon capture operation actually works in the cement sector year in, year out. This will be an exercise across multiple disciplines including engineering, the logistics of CO₂ transportation and sequestration, dealing with state-level partners on a long-term basis and more besides. Many more cement sector carbon capture projects are following in Europe. They will all be eager to learn from the first one in Norway, from both the good and the bad. We will leave the last word to Von Achten from today’s inauguration, "Personally I love the collaboration part of it because this is a masterpiece of national, European, in fact, global collaboration… These days this is important."

Norway: Heidelberg Materials CEO Dominik von Achten and Crown Prince Haakon of Norway have inaugurated the new carbon capture and storage (CCS) unit at the Brevik cement plant. The event was attended by 320 guests, inxluding Norwegian energy minister Terje Aasland. Von Achten said the producer’s ‘zero-CO₂’ cement, evoZero, is fully sold out for 2025. The Brevik CCS unit will capture 400,000t/yr of CO₂, equivalent to 50% of the plant's emissions. The first CO₂ has already been successfully captured, liquefied and temporarily stored, with injection into subsea reservoirs scheduled for August 2025. 

Von Achten said “Personally, I love the collaboration part of it because this is a masterpiece of global, national, European, in fact, global collaboration. Without the Norwegian government support we would probably not alone have a part in this project. The Norwegian government has significantly de-risked the project for us. That's why we are standing here today and celebrating this important milestone.”

He added “We can’t expect governments to finance these projects for the coming decades – it must work commercially. We have a physical product from Brevik that we will be delivering to Oslo and to other parts of Norway. We also have a virtual product, which will be like a purchase of a renewable energy contract, so that we can virtually allocate evoZero to Paris, to Berlin, to wherever it is needed.”

Von Achten said “The CO₂ concentration in our flue gas – at 20% – is much higher than in the atmosphere, so we have a huge technology and commercial advantage over direct air capture (DAC) approaches. I would say that our evoZero product brings significant commercial advantages to our customers.”

Yara International CEO Svein Tore Holsether said “There will be no green transition with red numbers.”

Energy minister Terje Aasland said Norway has been safely sequestering CO₂ in the Sleipner oil-field since 1996 and that storage is safe and permanent.

Latvia: Schwenk Latvija has captured the first CO₂ at its Brocēni cement plant using a pilot-scale carbon capture unit supplied by Norway-based Capsol Technologies. The CapsolGo unit will run in test mode until the end of 2025, capturing 2t/day of CO₂. The producer plans to make a final investment decision in 2027 on a potential full-scale carbon capture plant capable of capturing 800,000t/yr of CO₂. If this project goes ahead, then commissioning is expected in around 2030.

Chair of the board of Schwenk Latvija and managing director of Schwenk Northern Europe Reinhold Schneider said “We at Schwenk have come a long way through extensive analysis, studies, research and development processes and impact assessments to reach the point of the first CO₂ captured. Schwenk is strongly committed to launching a full-scale carbon capture plant in Brocēni by 2030. This test phase brings us one step closer to that.”