The U.S. Department of Energy has provided $2.1 million in funding to construction materials firm Solidia Technologies to formulate methods for carbonating its Solidia Cement.
Solidia Technologies will develop processes to produce synthetic supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) by using directly captured CO2 from the flu gas stream of an operating cement plant. The funding will enable the firm to devise an efficient carbonation method and test it to determine the efficacy of using this material instead of cement in concrete. It will be a low-CO2 alternative to OPC.
“The DOE funding will advance our CCUS technologies and synthetic SCMs that can be easily integrated into Portland Cement-based concrete formulations, offering manufacturers a solution that is sustainable environmentally and economically, both lowering the carbon footprint and offering an alternative to traditional SCMs, which are in increasingly short supply,” Solidia CEO Russell Hill said.
Using the carbonated SCM will deliver a product with similar or better performance than concrete made with commonly used SCMs, like fly ash.
Solidia Technologies has detailed plans to utilize CO2 in its cement processes for nearly 10 years. A 2013 white paper by researchers within the company showed that using Co2 instead of water in curing concrete reduced the carbon footprint and improved performance values.
