Today, Explained - A concrete solution to climate change

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Concrete is one of the world’s biggest sources of carbon emissions. Tech companies, including a startup co-founded by former NBA star Rick Fox, are looking to change that. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Isabel Angell, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most of the cement used in the United States is Portland cement. It gets its name because it looks like Portland stone, which is found on the Isle of Portland in England. And it's made by heating stones to very, very, very high temperatures. And as we'll explain in today's show, huge amounts of carbon are then emitted into the atmosphere. It's a problem, but for a long time, it's been one without a solution. There's always been a group of engineers and architects and folks that have been interested in it. But the thing is, it's just it hasn't been a high priority, you know, for building designers, for developers and what have you.

Except climate change is making it a higher priority. Today on the show, the visionaries of clean building materials. One of them is retired NBA player and actor, Ulrich Fox. That's coming up. The all new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves?

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Today, he's at Columbia's Center for Global Energy Policy. He was a lead author also of the industry chapter of the last IPCC report. What is his job job exactly? It's trying to figure out how to get rid of emissions in steel and cement. Between cement and steel, they are effectively the skeleton of our civilization. They hold everything up in the air, up against gravity. It's what we make our buildings, our bridges, our homes, the weight-bearing structures of everything we have. There is no material that will do the same things as concrete.

You cannot have the same type of strength levels. You cannot have the same type of durability. I mean, it is the second most consumed substance on the planet after water. Correct. Cement and concrete have been used for well over 2,000 years. We know at least that the Romans had a very effective cement that still holds things up today. They were master builders. And effectively, concrete is, if you take various sizes of stone and gravel that are glued together with cement, right? So, if you think of a Rice Krispie square, that dessert where you've got the little Rice Krispies held together with marshmallows, the cement is the marshmallow.

The Rice Krispies are the aggregate or the stone that holds everything up. I love this stuff. I'm going to name it after my daughter, Concretia. Flintstone, you're a genius. Okay, so when we're talking about a solution to the problem of cement, what is the problem of cement exactly? Effectively, cement is artificial rock. We've taken rock or limestone, we've heated it to 850 degrees Celsius.

I forget what that is in Fahrenheit, sorry. And then at that temperature, it breaks into two chemical components, calcium oxide and CO2. And we just release the CO2 to atmosphere. For every ton of cement that's manufactured, almost a ton of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. As a result, the cement industry is the second largest industrial emitter of CO2. We then take that calcium oxide and we bake it with some other minerals to make the cement that people think of. That stuff that comes in bags or in big mixers. You pour it in with water and then you pour it into a form

or you form it into something. And then when it dries out, it dries out into an artificial rock. But it's the baking of that stone that creates all the emissions. Cement is a concrete problem. The industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. That's about the same as every passenger

car on the road worldwide and far more than the global carbon emissions from aviation. Cement is not a natural substance as you've described it. We don't get it out of the earth. Who makes it? Oh, there are many big companies in almost every country that make this. Typically, your cement factories are outside of town, right?

Because in the past, they've been incredibly polluting because you need to get to really high temperatures first to split the limestone and then to bake what's called the clinker. Temperatures inside the kiln soar to nearly 3,000 degrees. This causes a chemical reaction in the raw materials as they slowly begin transforming. At this point in the process, the cement compound is called clinker. And cement plants are where we get rid of things we don't like. Most of our medical waste goes into these.

Anything that's toxic or potentially, you know, can make us sick comes out of hospitals. We burn that stuff in cement kilns to get to the temperatures we need. So in the past, they've been incredibly polluting. After years of legal wrangling, finally, Lehigh Southwest Cement Company will be paying for dumping millions of gallons of toxic water into the bay. In the last 20 or 30 years, we've gotten a lot better at cleaning the emissions that come from cement plant. But because of that, they tend to be outside cities, but close enough that you can truck in the cement and mix it with stones and what have you and other ingredients and bring it in by truck and then pour it onto a site where you'll make, I don't know, a car park, a building, or a bridge, or what have you. Limestone's heavy, right?

So you don't want to be too, too far from a limestone quarry, and often they're right beside a limestone quarry. So most major cities will have a cement plant right next to the closest limestone quarry, and that's where they get all their cement for everything you build. I am imagining that every country in the world needs cement, so every country in the world produces their own cement. But are there certain countries or certain places in the world where the most cement is produced? Yeah, no, absolutely. So China has been experiencing an industrial—they've been experiencing all sorts of revolutions since World War II. Hundreds of millions of people have been taken from sheer poverty to middle class status,

you know, in the last couple of decades. China's economy has grown faster than that of any other major country. Once poor and underdeveloped, the Asian giant has now grown into one of the most important export markets for manufacturers from all over the world. Their industry is the largest in the world, but as a consequence, they make over half the world's cement and concrete, and they've been building everything with that. It is a shrine to shopping and certainly a shrine to size. The company that built this building says it's 1.9 million square meters. That's more than 20 million square feet. When you measure it

by floor space area, it beats every other building in the world. Now they're getting to a point where they've got enough buildings, they've got enough bridges, they've got enough, you know, factories and what have you. So now a lot of those cement plants are kind of sitting idle and what they're doing is ending up exporting a lot of that clinker. After China, the demand for cement and concrete is increasing really rapidly. India, the U.S. produces obviously quite a bit, the European Union, Brazil, Russia. But the thing to note is a lot of developing countries are heading a point now where they're going to need a lot of concrete to build a lot of infrastructure. And if they make it the same way we did or the same way China did, we're not going to have our a lot of infrastructure. And if they make it the same way we did, or the

same way China did, we're not going to have our emissions problem under control. And we probably won't. It's one of those things that will contribute to going over two degrees Celsius, which is the Paris Agreement goal. In an ideal world, we would be using less cement, which means we'd have to be using something else. When building designers are looking at what else they could use, what are their options? I know this is the thing. Cement is really cheap. Cement and concrete are really cheap. So our architects, our designers tend to overuse it. And they use it wherever they can, and they're not incredibly careful. Like they oversize things now if you just ask them

to spend a bit more time on the design not sacrificing safety not sacrificing anything else they can probably cut the amount of concrete they pour into a building by about 20 to 30 percent so that's the first step right there the second step is that mineral i told you about earlier that heated limestone the cl clinker. We can replace up to half of that with coal fly ash. We put in blast furnace slag from steel plants. Some places can put in natural minerals. But there's another way where we take about one third ground limestone and two thirds local clays, heated local clays, and that can replace up to half the clinker. And that knocks out almost

half the emissions right there. So that's our secret weaponry in the near future, is use less concrete, just design for less concrete, and two, substitute out half the clinker. And that buys us a little bit of time to do the more expensive things, which is decarbonizing the production of the clean air. What does a company face when they try to bring a cement alternative to market at scale? One of the things is sometimes it changes the construction process a little bit. These are very conservative industries. They're conservative, A, because they don't, you know, if something works,

they don't want to mess with it. They don't want to be liable for anything that goes wrong. And obviously, no one wants to have an accident where things go wrong. And we've ended up with a very conservative construction industry because things have gone wrong in the past. Bridges have fallen down, buildings have fallen down because they weren't built well. Once they found something that worked, they just didn't want to change it, even though we do need to change things a bit. Coming up in the second half of our show, Chris, we're going to talk about a company called Partana. It was co-founded by Rick Fox, used to play in the NBA, and this company says it's created a concrete that's not as carbon intensive. Do you know anything about Partana, and do you think maybe this is a way forward? Since the Paris Agreement

in 2015, suddenly a lot of money and a lot of attention has been being paid to steel, cement, chemicals, whatever, heavy industry. So there's a lot of people that have kind of, okay, there's a business opportunity here to make low and possibly negative emissions cement. What Partana does, it's very particular to a specific set of resources, right? So, Partana uses a local seawater brine from a desalination plant with basically steel slag brought together. And what it does, because of its specific chemistry, it can actually absorb CO2 out of the air. Now, those are very specific conditions to that place and that need. And I believe the idea is to do this in the Bahamas where they have to do desalination.

You can't do that everywhere. You're not going to necessarily have all the minerals to do that. But that doesn't mean that we could have probably 10 different companies like Partenna operating globally, working with different local resources. Have you got clays? Have you got slags?

Have you got brines to work with? A lot of this is just playing with the chemistry and proving it works to construction firms and moving forward with it. I hear you saying there is actually room and perhaps even reason for optimism here. Oh, there's lots and lots of optimism. As I said, this is a very conservative industry that just hasn't changed anything for about half a century to a century. There's lots of different ways to do this we know are probably going to work.

We need to get construction companies and architects and engineering firms working with these new chemistries, getting practice with them. There are several different companies that have a shot at this. The older companies can use that one method I told you, the substituting out the clinker. And then we have this backstop technology where we can put what's called carbon capture and storage on the back of a steel plant, sorry, not a steel plant, a cement plant,

grab the CO2, clean it out, compress it, and push it underground. And cement is the one area where we think we can probably successfully do this. It's not cheap. It doubles the cost of making clinker. But it is the backstop that we have available after we've done all these other things. Chris Bataille, he's an energy researcher. Coming up, Fox on Rocks, former pro basketball star Rick Fox, co-founder of Partana. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

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This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Yeah, Patty, back it up, back it up. It's Today Explained. Rick Fox played in the NBA for 13 years, ending his career with the LA Lakers in 2004.

He then moved on to acting, for which he definitely has the face. He co-starred in the first five installments of Hallmark's Morning Show Mysteries, based on the novels of Al Roker and a lot of other stuff. And he's a co-founder of Partana, a company that makes clean or cleanish concrete. This, for him, is a very personal endeavor. I was called by the universe, not only to support my country, the Bahamas, at a time when we were devastated by Hurricane Dorian, back in 2019.

Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the Bahamas with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, with gusts going up over 200 miles per hour. Some 30,000 people were displaced. It's chaos here, and the place is unenharbable. Nobody can live here, so we're trying to get out. Thousands of homes were destroyed. In the battered northern Bahamas, massive piles of debris as far as the eye can see. People had died.

The United Nations says that 70,000 people on Abaco and Grand Bahama are in need of immediate humanitarian aid. And it was, they call it a one in a hundred year storm, but if you live in Hurricane Alley like we do, I grew up with hurricanes and they did not resemble what I witnessed on the ground when I went to add some relief efforts. It's something that no one wants to experience and in the case of our country and our region it's happening more frequently. Beyond Glasgow, beyond the ambition, the forests of Great Abaco have gone. For mile after mile it still looks like a wasteland and the communities around have hardly rebuilt. This is beyond just the loss of a home. Many people have no way to recover.

And so as you said about this journey, were you thinking in the Bahamas we need stronger homes that can survive hurricanes? Or were you thinking, climate change is a problem, and the place where I grew up, or the place where I'm from, the place where I have roots, is seeing more of these devastating hurricanes, and therefore we need to do something? Or was it a combination of both those things? It morphed into both. It started with the former, as you mentioned.

I was not a climate technology entrepreneur to begin with. I come out of the entertainment space. Rick Fox? I know she didn't. He's an incredibly attractive man, son. Dude was a Laker and a Celtic, and he's not dead from a manageable illness. My idea at that point in time was to just be more than just a citizen of the country that donated money at the time of devastation and start to search for greater answers and solutions.

So in the first half of our show, Rick, we learned about the difficulties of making concrete and cement. I mean, these are really energy-intensive processes. You at Partana have found a way to do this differently. What's this formula? What do you do that sets you apart? So our material is foundationally made up of large, big-scale industry wastes, one product being brine from the salination industry, the other product being slag from the steel industry. Both products are abundantly available globally, and in a lot of cases, either pushed back into the ocean from the brine standpoint, or in the case of steel,

put in landfills all over the world. We take those two, and we, through our process and our chemistry, use zero energy, zero Portland cement. We have a formula that we cure through the absorption of hydration, but also through the absorption of CO2. And we get to a finished concrete that avoids all the negativity of traditional cement-made concrete, and at the same time removes CO2 out of the atmosphere in the process of curing. So we, in a direct air capture capacity without any use of energy, we get to concrete, a greener, fresher, cleaner, finished concrete. I'm curious about something with respect to the process, which is the mixture that you're using of brine and slag. Those two things are still made from processes that produce a lot of CO2 emissions in their own right.

Isn't that the case? Yes, right. So tell me about how you kind of, you have to use something. Yes. But the things that you're using are emissions heavy. Tell me a bit about that, getting your mind around that. So you have to think of our processes the same way you would recycle plastic that's in the ocean or glass or anything that's being consumed and used regardless of whether or not partano was on the planet as a viable solution to our problem

steel is not going anywhere anytime soon the world is not going to stop developing desalination water and desalinating plants are growing increasingly in and around the planet water being the most valuable commodity out there, especially in the Middle East, in the region of the Middle East, it's more valuable than oil. We are simply taking the products that are being discarded as waste, none of that associated with our production. We're taking those waste materials that would otherwise sit in landfills or return to the ocean and creating more damage, impacting the seabeds.

We're taking those two things and turning them into feedstock for positivity and generating nature-positive building materials. So for us, those negative CO2 emissions are not assigned to us because we are picking them up after the fact and turning them into something positive. Now you know how to do it. What is Partana building and where are you building? Where can I see this stuff? We built the first carbon negative concrete home in the world in the Bahamas. You can go and visit it. We'll continue to build more of them in the coming year. Partana claims a 1,250 square foot home built with its cement will remove approximately 182 metric tons of CO2. That first home had zero Portland cement in it.

It had foundations made from Partana. It had CMU block. It had mortar. It had the columns. It had pour in place. And we built a home that, through the process of using our material generated 182 carbon credits. So out of that, we generated a positive result in a carbon credit. And that carbon credit, as we move forward here, can be used in a very positive way to support homeowners

into getting into homes because that value could be attributed to a down payment. It could be used to support greater infrastructure in a community. And so we're using our carbon credits generated from our home building for good. For the skeptics out there, Rick, what's it going to take to scale this? You built one of these homes. That's incredible. But did it take 15 years? Is it possible to make more of them quickly and cheaply? Currently, right now, we have an MOU with the government of the Bahamas for 1,000 affordable homes in the near three years coming up.

That affords anyone that's interested in building a sustainably green dwelling unit or home or a building could use our materials. As we scale, we're scaling in parts of the world where the conversation is more collaborative and sustainable goals and KPIs are being demanded. And so for us, the region of the Middle East right now, there's a huge demand for our product and setting up our manufacturing facilities to generate as much volume of material as possible is where we're focused on doing that. But we're in the U.S. as well. We're in the Caribbean and we're in the Middle East right now.

Let me ask you lastly, we learned in the first half of our show that there are many companies trying to do and in some cases actually doing what Partana is doing. Now, business is a competition. That's business brain. But there's another type of brain that goes into a project like this. And that's, you know, we're doing something good for the planet as we compete in the marketplace.

How do you view the other companies and the competition here? So currently right now, we are in support of far more solutions than just ours. In other words, as long as an entity is not greenwashing, as long as they're not marketing that they do what we do, right now, currently, no one does what we do. We avoid and remove CO2 through the process of the creation of our material to get to concrete. No one's able to do what we do today. There are others that do less bad. In other words, they're making,

building materials in a different fashion, but they use energy. They still heat. They still use, in some cases, some form of Portland cement. We're leading in the space of avoidance and removal. We're leading in the space of replacement of cement, not reducing cement.

We replace cement completely. We are leading in the space of carbon negative avoidance and removal. No one's quite doing that yet. There are some people out there that are claiming to do it, but they're still in the lab. We are actually delivering these materials today. So I hope they hurry up and they get there. I hope they continue to add to the solution of choices for those that are looking for the right choices. And we'll celebrate them as well. Rick Fox, co-founder of Partana.

Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Matt Collette and Amina El-Sadi. It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Isabel Angel. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.