Earlier this year, Georgina Sell, Principal Consultant, EMEA - Industry & Infrastructure, shared a paper ‘The Green Recovery and Beyond: How exactly are industries working to combat climate change?’, inspired by Project Drawdown’s roadmap.
Recently, Georgie spent time with Dr Nicola Kimm, Chief Sustainability Officer at Heidelberg Materials, to learn about some of the key drivers accelerating sustainability within the building materials industry.
As one of the world’s largest building materials manufacturers, Heidelberg Materials is a front runner on the road to carbon neutrality and the circular economy by decarbonizing operations and providing low carbon and circular products. Last year, Heidelberg Materials supplied the material for Europe's largest 3D concrete-printed building owned by Krauss Gruppe; a nine-metre-high cloud and data center in Germany.
Why is climate action such a key part of your business model?
Dr Nicola Kimm: Decarbonization is an intrinsic part of our company's strategy. We made the commitment to reduce our carbon emissions by almost 50 per cent by 2030, compared to 1990.
This is really important because concrete is the most used material in the world after water, and the production of cement – the “glue” in concrete - accounts for seven to eight per cent of global CO2 emissions.
How does Heidelberg Materials strategize towards decarbonization?
We drive the strategy in three elements. The first element is on the product side because when we produce cement two thirds of the emissions come from the reaction itself (making cement out of limestone) and the other third of the CO2 comes from energy use.
To really tackle cement emissions, we must change the product composition of concrete - less traditional cement and replacing it with other materials. We achieve this by using other by-products from different industries. For example, slag from the steel industry or fly ash from the coal industry, but as those industries also transform, we must seek different cement replacements. We can use pozzolanic or volcanic materials or globally-sourced clays to replace cement which is an important product lever.
The second lever is the process. We want to replace pet coke or coal and natural gas with alternative fuels such as waste materials, using municipal waste, tyres or biomass to reduce CO2 emissions.
Our third lever is carbon capture. Heidelberg Materials will be the first to have carbon capture for the cement industry at scale in Brevik, Norway, enabling us to fully decarbonize cement and create net zero carbon-captured cement. If you add cement to concrete to strengthen it, you will have unavoidable emissions from its production, so only through carbon capture, can you achieve net zero.
What specific decarbonization action is Heidelberg Materials taking?
Heidelberg Materials has a pipeline of CCS (carbon capture and storage) projects around the world. With our Brevik project, we've launched evoZero, a carbon captured, net zero cement and we will be the first on the market with this, having certified it through a third-party assurance process with DNV.
We monitor through blockchain technology, to ensure that every tonne of CO2 captured is only accounted for once, to provide our customers with a net zero cement that shows the history of the capturing process.
It’s a very solid documented and assured process. That net zero product comes on the market early next year and we're just in the process of finalising the facility, with further projects in places like Canada and the US. We have this strong pipeline and a front runner position in decarbonizing cement, but we also want to work on the other levers.
We aim to use less cement by replacing with other cementitious materials or reduce our carbon footprint through the alternative fuels. We look for opportunities where we can drive those first two levers (product and process) because our top priority is to reduce CO2 emissions quickly and significantly, and also because not every site is suitable for CCS as well.
What are the key outcomes of the implemented projects?
Key outcomes are bringing these products to market. A very special aspect of concrete is that it's 100 per cent recyclable and we are working on selective separation technology and that's driving the circular economy.
We're driving this technology in our facility in Poland, where we take back construction demolition waste and separate it into its constituent parts – sand, aggregates or rock and what we call recycled cement paste, which saves CO2 by avoiding the need for new cement.
We can take it through a further processing step where it reacts with CO2 from our process stream and permanently binds the CO2 in the paste.
This enables us to create new concrete with a lower product footprint and avoids the use of virgin materials.
We only lack the infrastructure to get back concrete demolition waste, separate it into its parts and then reuse it, so this is one thing that we're driving to both reduce CO2 and the use of virgin materials.
Can you expand on the innovations implemented by Heidelberg Materials?
We look for alternative sources of cementitious materials called SCM (supplementary cementitious materials). One example is in Ghana, Africa, where we've invested in a new process using calcined clay (which reduces CO2 significantly) which relies on new technologies, using less energy and creating a market.
Another example is new technologies, such as 3D printed buildings, so we can reduce both carbon and demand of material.
Last year Heidelberg Materials delivered the material for Europe’s largest 3D printed building, a technology which can reduce the amount of CO2 by 50 per cent and materials by up to 70 per cent, because you can put the concrete only where it's needed to reduce excess.
Tell me about Heidelberg Materials’ new funding to advance processes at its new cement plant in the US and the project selected by US Department of Energy’s industrial demonstrations programme?
Heidelberg Materials has just been selected for funding of up to $500m to advance industrial scale, carbon capture, transport and storage at our new plant in Indiana, USA.
We were super excited to hear the news that the Department of Energy (DOE) selected our project and they even held the ceremony at our site to announce the other winners, so we're very fortunate to receive this funding.
While carbon capture is the most costly of our three levers, it’s a necessary prerequisite for us to reach net zero by 2050, so if we think about CCS and how to actually make it happen, it requires funding so we rely on the EU Innovation Fund in Europe, the DOE in the US and in Canada we are also working closely with both provincial and federal governments.
Based also on the knowledge gained in Brevik, we have launched around a dozen other CCUS projects, some of which come with significantly higher capture rates and will completely decarbonize some of our cement plants already before 2030. In total, we have allocated €1.5 billion until 2030 to implement our CCUS projects.
The Nobel Centre in Stockholm will be the first building to be built with our net zero product from Norway, and it’s very important that we engage with different parts of the value chain, we don’t just talk to the procurement department anymore, we talk to the sustainability manager – it’s a different conversation with different people. We are also looking for innovative partners to build lighthouse projects (small-scale but big-picture projects).
In terms of climate solutions, what would be your biggest call to action when thinking about the industry?
My biggest call to action would be to create demand for net zero building materials. We see that 40 per cent of concrete demand is in public procurement, so we need to have procurement standards which really call for net zero.
