A Solid Breakthrough
4 years, 1 month, 1 day
21 June 2025
Concrete is the second most widely used material on the planet, after water.
It is ubiquitous in our built environment from buildings to bridges to highways and runways. Yet the production of cement needed for concrete contributes 8% of global carbon emissions, which is more than the entire carbon emissions of the EU (currently about 6%) and four times the carbon emissions from aviation. It has thus been recognised for a long time as one of the critical frontiers for decarbonisation, yet sat in the ‘hard to abate’ category on account of both the technical difficulty and the prohibitive cost of the only theoretically feasible solution – carbon capture, transport and storage. As a result the best advice to mitigate the planetary impact of it was to minimise its use, by designing it out to the maximum possible extent, and then using novel concrete-substitute blends to reduce the cement content, e.g. hempcrete. But given the sheer scale of its use, none of those mitigations offers a route to a fully decarbonised cement future.
A few weeks ago everything changed with the official opening of the world’s first decarbonised cement plant, owned by Heidelberg Materials in Brevik, Norway, supported by (also the world’s first for the industry) a CO2 transport and storage supply chain. The CO2 that is usually released into the atmosphere as limestone is heated in a kiln is now captured, cooled and pressurised into liquid form, stored briefly on site, and then transferred to ships which carry the liquid CO2 to the Northern Lights CO2 storage facility, owned by Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies There it is injected into permanent natural storage caverns 2.6km below the North Sea. The launch was accompanied by the signing of a diplomatic agreement between Switzerland and Norway for cross border CO2 transport and storage, and came a week after the UK government committed nearly £10 billion to its own carbon capture, usage and storage ambitions.
I was privileged to be at the official launch and was awed by the significance of the breakthrough. But what impressed me more was the story of vision, bravery and collaboration that lay behind it. The vision that began 20 years ago, in 2005, when engineers at Brevik first floated the idea of decarbonising their plant. The bravery of business and political leaders who agreed to run with something that at the time seemed impossible. And the collaboration between the Norwegian government, the European Commission, Heidelberg and numerous other business partners to make the impossible a reality.
Photo credit: Heidelberg Materials/Aleksej Keksel