Traditional concrete manufacturing processes result in a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement produced – and since we're talking about somewhere around 4.1 billion tons globally just in 2022 – more than half of that in China alone – cement is a massive contributor to climate change, being responsible for about 8% of global carbon emissions.
This makes it an equally massive opportunity; whoever gets to global scale first on a cost-competitive, totally zero-carbon cement alternative could well be sitting on a giant money-printing machine as decarbonization mandates and carbon taxes start to kick in.
There is no shortage of low-carbon and carbon-capturing concrete alternatives in the works, but MIT spinout Sublime Systems is particularly interesting, since it takes a novel electrochemical approach to cement-making that's "true zero carbon" instead of "net zero carbon" or "carbon-sequestering" – in that it can totally eliminate carbon emissions at both the key points where they typically arise in the process.
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