Navigating Net Zero

This featured blog was provided by Lafarge Canada. Authored by Rob Cumming, Head of Sustainability and Public Affairs, Lafarge Canada (East).

The world needs concrete, cement and concrete are essential to the world’s urban infrastructure development. As we build our cities, and prepare for the inevitable climate extremes coming our way, we must acknowledge that the cement and concrete industry represents 7-8% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and contributes to global warming extremes. Hence the challenge: we need to build but we must decarbonize.

How can the building solutions industry meet this challenge?

In some ways it’s simple for the cement industry – it’s all about clinker – the core source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Global industry players must:

• Avoid carbon emissions by replacing carbon-emitting clinker in concrete; or
• Produce this clinker with lower emissions;
• Use clinker sparingly and efficiently; and
• Capture the rest and use or store the carbon.

Or more simply still: replace, reduce, be efficient, and capture – the underlying logic of the Roadmap to Netzero outline in Table 1.

However, it is useful to group these industry solutions into three lanes: producer control, supply chain collaboration, and innovation partners.

Lane 1: Cement Producer Controlled Actions

The Industry has many known and proven solutions that are fully under its control such as replacing fossil fuels with lower carbon fuels and replacing older technologies with more efficient modern kilns. Both strategies yield cash savings through efficiency – and profit-producing tipping fees where low-carbon fuels are produced from waste. Supplementary Cementitious Materials can be expanded.  GHG reduction is a nice byproduct. The challenge here is pace of change and access to capital in the global competition for investment. An ability to monetize these GHG  reductions (through carbon pricing, carbon markets, tax breaks, or granting programs) will spur faster implementation for these – the most straightforward solutions in the industry. 

Nonetheless, these clinker and cement actions only take the industry partway down the road – roughly 30% per tonne of cementitious product for the Canadian Industry for example (see Concrete Zero report). The good news is that this can be done straightforwardly as the industry can “do it alone” especially with the addition of supportive carbon policies. These investments will yield a “like for like” cement product and so decarbonize buildings – with modest cost increase for builders and little need for change in their practices.

Lane 2: Supply Chain Collaboration Actions

The next suite of solutions will require the building industry as a whole to change its practices. Without a doubt, this will be a much harder lift.

The Concrete Zero report notes that nearly an additional 40% reduction in embodied carbon is possible through these Concrete and Construction strategies. It will require deliberate partnering and planning up and down the building supply chain – conversations that don’t happen today. In the absence of any incentives such as green building standards or carbon pricing, the pace of progress will be painfully slow. 

Some possible early wins are emerging where smart construction design using modern computational design techniques places the right strength concrete in the right places. All too often, for example, an entire pad is poured with the highest strength concrete where only a portion of the pad is needed at that strength for structural needs. Smart design ultimately reduces clinker content, the most significant cost driver (and carbon emitter) in concrete. Even then, this requires new practices and new placement techniques in an industry that is resistant to change. We need pilot projects with willing partners to start to change these practices.

Another example is the use of performance standards that allow sophisticated mix designers to deliver concrete tailored to specific needs of the project, but with much lower embodied carbon content and often at a relatively small or no price premium – and even deeper reductions with larger price premiums. The ASTM-1157 standard is an example of a performance standard. However, including this approach in other national and international standards will be slow due to resistance to change. Embedded instrumentation may reduce risk and pilot projects can help change practices.

Deeper embodied carbon reductions may require the builder to accept ever larger trade-offs and risk-sharing mechanisms that are far from the industry norm. Will Concrete Formers be prepared to wait longer for a target strength to be reached in a tight building schedule? Can we use embedded instrumentation here too to remove uncertainty? 

Understandably, engineers and architects are cautious when new building solutions emerge and are slow to adopt them – particularly when there is no apparent project or personal benefit, apart from decarbonization, at play. Fortunately, Green Building or Green Procurement Standards are emerging and create a market incentive for low-carbon solutions. These approaches will drive cooperation between the cement and concrete supplier, the constructor, the engineer, and the owner to find the trade-offs that ensure affordability and safety while also decarbonizing the built environment.

So far, the focus has been on carbon intensity and emissions per unit of product. The decarbonization matter becomes much more daunting when absolute or total emissions are considered – and, frankly, this is the important measure. Assuming a 2% annual growth in concrete usage, over 10 years, yields a 22% increase in production partly offsetting emission intensity reductions. It is worth noting that if the pace of decarbonization outstrips the pace of growth, then clinker production will decline which is where the GHG savings are found.

Therefore, Carbon pricing and Green Procurement will drive innovation inside and outside the industry and innovation must also fill in the last piece of the puzzle.

Lane 3: Innovation Partners

Assuming optimistically that these first four C’s of decarbonization are implemented in the next 10 years, then achieving the last 25-30% to NetZero remains the billion-dollar question. 

There aren’t too many problems that a billion dollars can’t solve. A reasonable cost estimate for standalone CCUS projects (CCS, eFuels) is $1.5 billion for one cement plant; but even if we assume $1 billion with further innovation, that still represents over $2.5 trillion in investment for the global cement industry. Avoiding or reducing this mind-boggling cost is where innovation must come in – especially in the absence of an offsetting strategy. Whether through innovatively reducing the cost of CCUS technologies, creating new partnerships with other industries to share costs, or finding ways to produce cements without clinker, the industry needs partners to reach this goal. The good news is that new innovations in this industry are being announced every week and, in time, solutions will be found.

Getting into Gear

Here’s a practical yet aggressive approach. Implement the actions that are under the control of the industry, responding to the carbon price signal where it exists, and work jointly to create the policy environment that fosters supply chain collaboration and innovation. This will mean doing the foundational work to ensure strong governance, robust carbon accounting practices for a level playing field, a shared taxonomy, adoption of performance standards, and inculcate a culture of low carbon innovation.

Lastly, the industry must seek a policy environment that makes the sustainable path the profitable path for the industry while delivering affordable and building solutions. The industry simply cannot reach NetZero by “doing it alone” but needs to proactively and urgently pursue partners to ensure we continue to build for people and the planet for the rest of the century.

^[1] ConcreteZero:Canada’s Cement and Concrete Industry Action Plan to Net-Zero https://cement.ca/sustainability/concrete-zero/