Cement production is responsible for about 8% of all global emissions—and it’s a stubborn industry to decarbonize because it is so energy-intensive. That’s where Fortera comes in. As CEO and co-founder, Ryan Gilliam is working to make it easy for existing cement plants to become more sustainable by installing technology to capture up to 90% of the plant’s emissions and converting that CO2 back into cement. In April this year, Fortera opened its first commercial climate-friendly cement plant based in California—the first such kind in North America—capable of producing 15,000 tons of cement while avoiding 9,600 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government (other than your own), needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?
In order to solve CO2 emissions at the scale required to have a meaningful impact, significant scaling is required. I think governments and the private sector need to align on both the need and joint strategy for capital project financing to advance technologies from commercial first-of-a-kind facilities to global deployment. This is specifically hard in climate tech where the hard to abate sectors are high capital cost and low margin industries that do not typically operate under traditional project financing mechanisms. This lack of clear funding will hinder many impactful technologies from being able to have an impact on CO2.
What is a climate solution (other than your own) that isn’t getting the attention or funding it deserves?
Climate solutions will require scale to have a meaningful impact. If we are going to solve the problem, we have to double down on solutions that can provide gigaton savings. The majority of concepts that have been funded, while great steps for the climate, don’t meet this needed bar, either due to the scalability of the sector or ability to achieve economic competitiveness. I believe that concepts around ocean liming, mineral looping, and mineral carbonation need more attention from innovators. I also fundamentally believe that one of the biggest challenges in this fight is time. Picking solutions that leverage existing infrastructure, existing feedstocks, existing supply chains, existing process units, and that are economically competitive without the need for green incentives, will be needed if we are going to scale solutions fast enough.
If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next U.N. climate conference, what would you say?
Governments have done an incredible job solving the first of two steps. By introducing concepts like tax incentives, loan guarantees, grants, hydrogen pricing, etc., governments have spurred incredible innovations in the climate space and have helped many promising technologies scale to demonstration and first-of-a-kind facilities. The second and arguably more critical step towards meaningful reductions in CO2 is providing funding mechanisms to drive global expansion. Traditional funding mechanisms are risk averse and will need some form of guarantees, committed offtake agreements, firm price on CO2, etc. to unlock the capital needed to get to appreciable volumes in the timeframes needed.
