Achieving Net-Zero Concrete

Podcast Transcript

Aali Alizadeh:

Hello there, and welcome to the Construction Revolution Podcast. My name is Aali Alizadeh, and here on the show, we explore the latest trends, technologies, people, and organizations that are revolutionizing or disrupting the construction industry and are changing what the industry will look like tomorrow. Today on the show, I’m speaking with Adam Auer, the president and CEO of the Cement Association of Canada. Adam has spent over two decades working with public, private, and non-profit institutions with a strong focus on industrial decarbonization. As CAC’s President and CEO, Adam’s primary focus is to secure the cement sector’s continued competitiveness and leadership in Canada’s transition to a climate-resilient, net-zero economy.

With Adam’s leadership, the CAC’s working towards its vision of building resilient and sustainable communities with net-zero concrete. One example of this is the CAC’s recently published report Concrete Zero, Canada’s cement and concrete industry action plan to net zero. As someone who’s also passionate about driving the industry to net zero, I’m excited to dive into this topic with Adam.

Welcome to the show, Adam. It’s very nice to have you here with us at the Construction Revolution Podcast. Before we start, we would love to hear more about your background. You did your education in the environmental side, and then you moved to the public sector and then private sector. It would be great to learn about your background.

Adam Auer:

Sure, thanks, Aali, and thanks for having me today. Well, I’ve always been interested in environment and sustainability issues ever since I was a kid. In fact, I remember being at the cottage and telling my mom when I was about nine years old I wanted to be a marine biologist and actually went to UBC and studied marine biology many years later. But I think over the course of my education and experience became convinced that it was really in the policy side that I could make the biggest impact and went on to do a grad degree in environmental studies and have worked in the public and nonprofit sector ever since on a variety of sustainability issues, but with a big focus on corporate sustainability and environmental finance in particular. And that sort of meandering path ultimately led me into the cement sector.

Aali Alizadeh:

Okay. No, that’s an interesting journey, and I would love to hear a bit more in that area as we go forward in this podcast. But within the Cement Association of Canada, your role as the president and CEO, what are the day-to-day activities that you have as the leader in one of the most influential organizations in Canada for the cement and concrete industry?

Adam Auer:

Well, the Cement Association of Canada is the national trade association for cement producers in this country, and we represent every single facility in Canada except for one privately owned facility in Quebec. If you go to our website and you look at our mission and our vision, our role really is focused on creating the optimal conditions for our industry to lead and thrive in a clean economy. And our vision is to build resilient and sustainable communities with net-zero concrete. Those in some ways sound like fairly lofty ambitions, but they really do define the day-to-day work both of myself and of my team. We’re focused on obviously working across the construction value chain and also obviously very closely with governments, all three levels of government in Canada, on creating those optimal conditions, if you will.

We’ll get into it a little bit more when we talk about our net-zero action plan, but our objective of leading and thriving in the clean economy and net-zero economy really is one that can’t be achieved alone. It’s one that needs to be achieved in collaboration with governments in terms of building the right policy environment, the right regulatory environment, the right fiscal frameworks, and also working with the construction sector, ultimately the users of concrete, to help support innovation and bring those innovations to market. So more or less, everything we do is focused on those types of activities.

Aali Alizadeh:

Thanks, Adam. And as you know, concrete, if it was a country, would rank third after the US and China in terms of global CO2 emissions. And I know it’s something that Cement Association of Canada is focused on, the sustainability aspect of the concrete industry and specifically the net-zero construction part of things. And with that in mind, can you explain a little bit about the Concrete Zero Action Plan and how your team developed this report over the past couple of years?

Adam Auer:

Sure. Well, the Concrete Zero Action Plan is basically a plan to ensure that cement and concrete achieves its carbon emissions reductions goals of getting to net zero by 2050. And we take some time in that report to talk about the progress that we’ve made as an industry. Sustainability is not a new priority for the industry. It’s one that we’ve been committed to for many decades, but now we’re sort of in the crunch time, in particular when it comes to carbon emissions and climate change. So our action plan is really to lay out the pathway to achieving higher emissions reductions and faster. So while talking about the achievements that we’ve made so far, it really is looking at what is the foundation for the work that needs to happen between now and 2050 to make that net-zero journey a reality.

And we have set interim targets. We have a 40% reduction goal by 2030, a little over 60% by 2040, on the road to net zero by 2050. And we’ve effectively modeled all of the levers across the construction value chain that we know of today. Using today’s technology, where do we think those reductions can come from? And if you know anything about how cement and concrete is produced, you know that cement, the primary constituent in cement is clinker. And so we start our net-zero action plan with a look at clinker production and then move on to what we call the five Cs. So starting with clinker, then cement, then concrete, then construction, and then carbonation or carbon uptake, the ability of concrete to absorb carbon over its life. And we dissect those five Cs to examine based on what we know today… And this is an important feature, I think, of the action plan, is we really are focused on proven technologies. Where are the reductions going to come from, and what partnerships do we need to make those reductions a reality?

And interestingly, you mentioned that a lot of the government work is coming from the environment side, but actually there’s a big shift that’s happening now. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last 10 years of my career at the Cement Association, certainly working with environmental agencies on everything from carbon pricing to permitting regimes for lower carbon fuels, et cetera. But now when we’re talking about the net-zero world, it really is about the marriage of environment and economy. How do we make net zero profitable effectively?

So we’re migrating from a climate-change policy regime that’s not strictly coming from environment ministries. Obviously, they still have a very key role to play, but it’s also now coming from economic ministries. Finance is obviously deeply involved in carbon pricing, but also investment tax credits, innovative financing mechanisms like Carbon Contracts for Difference that help companies invest in first-commercialization low-carbon technologies. We have a very significant partnership with Industry, Science, and Economic Development, Minister Champagne’s department, which is again really about industrial policy. How do we modernize industrial policy for a net-zero world? How do we make environmental or industrial policy a policy that supports the transition of our sector and the economy as a whole to net zero and to take advantage of the competitive opportunities that will come from that?

Aali Alizadeh:

As you mentioned, there are different ways to address the emissions from this industry. There are different approaches. What are some of the main areas that are highlighted in the Concrete Zero report as being crucial to reaching net zero? You mentioned briefly about the clinker side of things. But what are the other approaches and levers that can be used to reduce the CO2 emissions of the cement and concrete industry?

Adam Auer:

Well, there are a number of things that can be done on the manufacturing side. That includes obviously technology investments, manufacturing innovations. There are a number of things that need to happen in the market. Mainly, the market needs to come to understand, trust, and implement the solutions, the manufacturing solutions that our industry is able to provide. And then we need government to both support that transition, which can happen through accelerated adoption of innovation in the codes and standards and specifications. It can be support for showcasing and helping to de-risk those innovations by being the first user of those low-carbon solutions in the market.

Governments are obviously a significant client of the building-material sector, not just cement and concrete, but represent probably about 30% of the market when you look at public infrastructure at the municipal, provincial, and federal level. And so there’s a huge role that they can play on the buy-clean or green-procurement side of things to help pull low-carbon innovations into the market and show to the rest of the sector that these are solutions that both reduce carbon but do so in a way that provides all the same performance that we need to ensure that our buildings and infrastructure are durable and resilient and long-lasting.

And then of course, when we’re talking about really deep reductions, in particular first-commercialization technologies like carbon-capture utilization and storage, there is both an ongoing role for research and development, but I think in many cases these technologies are ready. They’re just far too expensive. The market is not willing to pay enough for concrete and steel and other materials to cover the cost of building a CCUS plant, which in our case would be probably about two or three times the cost of just building a new cement facility, period. That’s how expensive the CCUS technology is at this point. So it’s getting that constellation of fiscal supports to allow those transformative technologies to become investible in our sector.

And the government’s actually been doing a really great job of putting together a package of supports that will help some of those novel technologies get off the ground, like the Net Zero Accelerator, like the investment tax credits for CCUS and other technologies, like Carbon Contracts for Difference and other innovative financing mechanisms that were announced through the Canada Growth Fund. So I think at the high level, that’s sort of the constellation of what needs to happen. It’s really there are things we can do as an industry on our own, but actually most of those things still require us to work collaboratively with the construction sector and with government to make sure that those solutions are making their way into the market.

Aali Alizadeh:

Thank you. You briefly touched on the idea there are different approaches here, leveraging obviously government and the public procurement, especially when it comes to building infrastructure and how we can incorporate new approaches and green technologies into achieving that net-zero vision. But overall, what do you think are the main obstacles in achieving the net-zero construction, whether it’s in Canada or other parts of the world? What are the obstacles that you see from your perspective as a risk in achieving that net-zero vision?

Adam Auer:

It’s a great question because I don’t think those obstacles are what most people would think of as the obvious ones. And one of the things I’ve learned is one of the biggest challenges to getting to net zero, I think, in any sector is not really technological. Obviously, there are some economic barriers, but ultimately you can… It’s pretty easy to envision how those will ultimately be overcome, and we’ve seen examples in solar and wind and other types of technologies where that’s happened. And there’s issues of scale, which I do think are things that we sometimes under-appreciate just how much has to happen and how quickly.

But one of the biggest challenges in my mind is really just the change-management piece, especially in the construction sector, which is inherently conservative. And by that, I mean it’s an industry that tends to see all forms of novelty as a form of risk, and I think there’s obvious reasons for that. I mean, this is an industry that builds critical infrastructure. It’s an industry that operates on very tight margins, and so there’s not a lot of room for error, either engineering error or market error. So there’s a hesitancy to adopt innovations, particularly in the sustainability space, that I think is going to take a lot of education and collaboration to overcome.

Our sort of learning around that started with a product called Portland-limestone cement, which is really just a cement that uses less clinker. Clinker is the carbon-intensive constituent in cement, and Portland-limestone cement uses a higher proportion of unprocessed or un-kiln-fired limestone. It increases the amount of that unprocessed limestone that you can add to cement in Canada by 10%, and it gives you about a 10%, or up to a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously, we had to spend a number of years getting that product through the codes and standards system in Canada, which we did. And then we were kind of surprised that the market didn’t instantly transition to this new product, because it was relatively low-hanging fruit. It didn’t really require a lot of behavior change. It’s a performance-equivalent cement. It’s a cost-equivalent cement, but it has these environmental attributes of lower carbon. And yet, we experienced a huge amount of hesitation simply, I think, out of a caution by specifiers in the industry around trying something that they hadn’t tried before. And that’s despite the fact that Portland-limestone cement is something that’s been used for decades in other parts of the world for all manner of infrastructure: 80-story buildings and subterranean tunnels and hydroelectric dams. There’s no real reason to be concerned about its performance. But because it was new in this market, there was a pretty steep learning curve to get to the point where we’re now at pretty high market adoption of that product.

So when we think ahead of even deeper innovations, higher limestone content PLCs, blended cements, or other innovations that are going to maybe even require some behavior change in terms of different approaches to optimizing mixes or maybe slight changes to construction methodologies or what have you, then I see that as a massive challenge that we need to overcome. And I think thankfully the construction sector is also coming to appreciate its role in the net-zero journey and that we have a number of very progressive actors in that segment of the sector that are starting to reach out and wanting to work with us on these solutions. So I do think we’ll get it done. But yeah, that is, I think, the single biggest barrier, is just the resistance that we inherently have as humans to change, and that resistance is particularly acute in the construction sector.

Aali Alizadeh:

Okay, perfect. Then I think you mentioned an interesting point, Adam, about sort of industry not being open to new technology and change, and rightly so. There’s a lot of liability associated with things if they go wrong. If it’s critical infrastructure and if a building collapses, there are a lot of liabilities associated with that. So almost always different players, whether they’re construction companies or concrete producers, are over-designing to prevent potential issues.

And it seems that it’s a teamwork. So everyone needs to work together, whether it’s buyers of concrete or producers of concrete and building-code developers, to allow and encourage people to adopt new technologies and change and change management, to your words. One of these areas, I think, is performance-based concrete versus prescriptive-based concrete. And a lot of the time, concrete is basically required to have a minimum cement content in it. Whether concrete producers can optimize it or not, that’s not really considered. So where do you see the main driver behind changing that? Is it going to be the government saying that we’re going to allow leaner concrete materials to be used, or is it the building code and academia and universities that are required to do more research to support that? That seems to be one of the feedback that we have also heard from concrete producers, that we want to optimize our mixes, but there is a prescription here that we have to follow.

Adam Auer:

Yeah, that’s an excellent question, and it absolutely relates to the earlier question about barriers, and I don’t want to say the construction industry not being open to change, but being maybe slow to change or somewhat resistant to change. And it really comes down to specifications at the end of the day. Obviously, cement and concrete producers have no interest in producing an inferior product, but there is this kind of prescriptive culture among specifiers.

And I think this is particularly true in the public sector, where there are limitations placed on optimizing your mixes. And often those come, as you say, in the form of minimum cement contents. The other key one would be maximum SCM or supplementary cementitious material contents. And those are two key levers for reducing carbon in concrete. There’s already a lot we can do to reduce carbon simply through mix optimization if we were able to move away from those prescriptive requirements. I do think government has a huge role to play, both on the codes and standards side and, as I mentioned earlier, around green procurement. They can really lead the way in showing what performance-based specifications look like on public projects and show that… demonstrate, verify the GHG benefits, but also demonstrate that these solutions are just as performative as the cements and concretes that we’re used to using.

And I think as an industry, we acknowledge that we have a role on the education side to do more to showcase the technical due diligence that goes into the production of new cements and concretes and to provide that confidence to specifiers that these mixes will perform. So to that extent, we do spend a fair amount of time with specifiers, and we work in particular with ministries of transportation, which tend to be the most conservative when it comes to adopting novel mixes. Anyhow, the progress is slow, but I think there is a growing acknowledgement that we need to tackle this GHG issue in our infrastructure. Embodied carbon in the materials that we use to build our infrastructure is important, and obviously, specifications can either enable or inhibit solutions to climate change. So those conversations are happening.

The challenge is when you think about the fact that a huge proportion of our infrastructure investments happen at the municipal level and then you think about the number of municipalities that we have in Canada, there’s no way that a handful of folks working in our industry, either at the Cement Association or at the provincial Ready Mix Associations or even within our companies, have the human resources to get to every single municipality. So we do need to be thinking about how, especially at the federal and provincial level and through the codes-and-standards process, how can we create a model approach to performance-based specifications that can be easily adopted by all levels of government and also by the private sector?

Aali Alizadeh:

Okay, thank you, Adam. You have had, for sure, several focus groups with industry giants and concrete producers and cement producers in Canada and probably in other countries. What are the technological innovations or, I don’t know, maybe to some extent a wishlist that concrete producers are bringing up and saying, “I wish I had this technology or this solution to help me achieve reductions in… whether it’s in the CO2 emissions or optimizing mixes or making more, I think, higher-performing clinkers and things like that”? What are the technologies that you think are evolving and emerging, and concrete producers and cement producers are looking forward to adopting those?

Adam Auer:

I guess there’s probably two ways to answer that question. On the manufacturing side, as we describe in our Net-Zero Action Plan, a lot of the technologies are actually well understood. 30% of the emissions to produce cement come from combustion processes where we use fossil fuels. So there’s a huge opportunity to replace those fossil fuels with lower-carbon alternatives, which is a technology that we’re deploying today and we look to scale rapidly in this decade. And there are, I think, evolutions of the types of low-carbon fuels that are available to us that will allow us to ultimately get to net-zero combustion emissions.

A huge part of our reduction strategy has to do with clinker optimization. So reducing the amount of clinker that you need in your cement and ultimately the amount of cement and, therefore, clinker that you need in your concrete mix. And I think that’s where there’s a real opportunity for innovations that would provide, going back to the conversation that we just had, would provide more confidence to specifiers and to those in the construction industry actually using the concrete in the performance of their material. There’s limitations, for example, to the types of solutions that you can apply when it’s really hot outside versus when it’s really cold. And I think there’s some anticipation that technology, whether it’s admixtures or sensors or what have you, that will help us overcome some of those limitations and continue to optimize the GHG reductions that can come from… that can be deployed in any construction context. So I think there’s some excitement there.

And ultimately, on the cement side in particular, we’re really looking to carbon capture and utilization as a technology that’s going to be necessary to get those remaining emissions down to zero. So there’s a lot that we can do through combustion emissions management, through different cement formulations and optimized concrete mixes, through design efficiency, making sure that we’re not over-designing our infrastructure. There’s a lot of things that we can do today to save significant emissions. Over 60% of the emissions from our sector, we believe, can come from those types of solutions.

But at the end of the day, we’re going to need some form of carbon-capture utilization and storage to get to zero, and so that’s obviously a technology that we’re very focused on. We have two companies right now in Canada that are pursuing commercial-scale carbon-capture facilities at their cement production plants, the most advanced of which is in Edmonton, Alberta, where Heidelberg Materials has a facility. They hope to actually have carbon-neutral cement production before the end of this decade. So they hope to be capturing CO2 at a commercial scale by 2026, which is quite amazing. If you think about what that would signify in terms of a transformative change in our sector, it would be a historic transition, absolutely. That’s that project. And another similar project also in Alberta by Lafarge at their Exshaw facility will be looking at carbon storage solutions. And that’s largely because Alberta’s got great storage space, and they also have great infrastructure to transport captured CO2 to those storage sites.

In other parts of the country, we hope that those storage opportunities will be identified, and we hope that the infrastructure, the sort of backbone transportation infrastructure will be developed to allow commercial-scale capture and storage across the country. But the reality is we’re probably going to need to find not just places to stick CO2 underground, but commercial uses of CO2 that will allow facilities where storage is not an option or too expensive or there are other barriers, will allow capture to still make sense. And we’re kind of fortunate in the cement and concrete industry that there are a whole bunch of technologies out there that are looking at utilization in cement and concrete products. So taking advantage of concrete’s natural ability to absorb CO2 over time, there are technologies looking to accelerate that process through a variety of different types of strategies to make concrete effectively a repository for captured CO2 from our industry and potentially others. So I think that’s one area where we’re also quite excited to see technology continue to evolve and develop.

I should say that in our action plan, while we talk about those utilization technologies, we don’t actually project any emissions reductions from those technologies. As I said at the beginning, we’re focused on technologies that… Well, we sort of set a cutoff of TRL 6 or 7, meaning that these are technologies that we know work. Even if they’re not fully commercially available or fully economic yet, we know that technologically they’re sound. On the carbon-utilization side or, as we would say in our sector, the carbon-mineralization side in concrete, there’s a whole bunch of partnerships happening between our members and different technology providers in that space. But we haven’t predicted yet how many reductions will come from that class of technologies, but it’s certainly one where we’re quite excited about what’s happening.

Aali Alizadeh:

Amazing. And at lower TRL, I think there are a lot of new technologies, as you mentioned, that are being developed. And your action plan is based on what’s available and what today is possible. And as you said, with the new technologies that are evolving, we may achieve the division even faster then. If you look at the advancements in the artificial intelligence and what that can do to our industry with billions of data points that are produced every day around the globe in terms of concrete mixes that are produced and truck-to-truck deliveries, and the data on those can be used to be basically analyzed by an AI algorithm to optimize these recipes using different conditions. So these are things that down the line, I think, in a couple of years, a few years, as the AI is evolving, can make a big difference. Do you have any insight or feedback in that area?

Adam Auer:

Well, I think my overall response would be I 100% agree with you. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why we committed to updating our action plan at least every five years, because we know that the landscape is going to change very quickly. You mentioned AI, and we can see already how quickly that technology is starting to infiltrate its way into all manner of all different aspects of our lives. And I think in industry, it’s going to evolve in ways that we may not even predict yet. So we want to be able to capture that change in relatively short periods of time so that we can update our plan, make it more ambitious where possible, and account for how rapidly certain technologies, which may not be at a high enough TRL level yet today, but which may become so very, very quickly. We want to be able to capture that change in future updates to the report.

I’m not an expert in AI, but obviously when we talk about mix optimization as one important lever to decarbonizing cement and concrete, it’s pretty easy to imagine how AI might be able to help with that in terms of its predictive ability, but also ability to help manage things like consistency and whatnot. So it’s very exciting how quickly some of these technologies are evolving, for sure.

Aali Alizadeh:

Great to hear that. And in your role as the President and CEO of Cement Association of Canada, you’ve been working over the past 10 years with this association, and now there’s a very exciting chapter ahead of you. What are you most looking forward to in regards to the future of the cement and concrete industry?

Adam Auer:

Well, I mean, we have really tried with our… not just with our action plan, but the action plan is the most recent articulation of this. We’re an industry that has been around since ancient times and is really at the heart of the modern world. I mean, we like to say… When I give speeches and stuff like that, I just ask people look out the window, if we happen to be in a room with windows, and take stock of everything that they see and just how much of it comes from our sector. I mean, we really are literally the foundation of modern communities. And I think that imbues us with a certain sense of pride, but also a certain sense of accountability when it comes to facing challenges like climate change. We talked about how the cement sector is responsible for about 7% of emissions globally, and here in Canada, it’s about 1.5% of our national emissions that come from the cement sector. So we take that responsibility quite seriously. I believe it’s actually baked into the kind of culture or DNA of the industry to be solutions providers.

So I’m excited about the role that we have been playing, that we are playing, and that we aim to continue to play to lead the way on what industrial decarbonization looks like. I mean, we’re the first sector to develop a formal partnership with the federal government around our net-zero roadmap. And we’re both kind of feeling our way around what that partnership looks like, both on the government and industry side. But it’s a super-exciting opportunity to kind of model what a different kind of relationship between industry and government can produce in terms of innovation and, in this case, carbon reductions. And so we want to be at the forefront. I like to say we don’t want to just be at the table. We want to help set the table and really lead the conversation.

So I think we’re, with our action plan, we’re doubling down on that commitment. We think it’s one of the most transparent, if not the most transparent net-zero action plans out there, certainly from heavy industry. And we’re really excited about the conversations that that is going to unlock. We’ll make mistakes along the way, and I’m sure there will be a variety of missteps, but that’s sort of part of the challenge of being a leader in this space. And we’ll learn from them, and we’ll grow from them and then continue to push forward.

My friends kind of ask me how I get so passionate about cement and concrete because it’s not something that people really think about all that much and certainly, in the sustainability space, not one that has been traditionally associated with climate leadership and sustainability. But we really are at the forefront in our sector, and it’s super exciting to be part of that.

Aali Alizadeh:

That’s really exciting. It sounds like an amazing journey ahead of you. And I think with the vision that you have at the Cement Association of Canada and the partnership with the government of Canada, this vision looks more achievable than ever. If our audience wants to learn more about the activities of the Cement Association of Canada and specifically the Concrete Zero Action Plan, where should they find more information? Where should they go?

Adam Auer:

You can find the Concrete Zero Action Plan at concretezero.ca, and that will take you to a landing page. Well, that will describe the action plan and also provide a link to download the full document. It also is connected to our broader Cement Association of Canada website, which is cement.ca, where you can learn more about the association and our other sustainability activities.

Aali Alizadeh:

Great. Thank you so much, Adam, for sharing your insight and feedback with our audience. It was great chatting with you today and all the best.

Adam Auer:

Thanks, Aali. I really appreciate the opportunity and enjoyed the chat as well.