The city of Magna, Utah was once home to a large coal-fired power plant that provided electricity for Rio Tinto’s enormous copper mine next door. But in 2019 the company shutters the last of the four coal units, choosing instead to power its mining operations with wind and solar energy.
Now plans are underway to open a different kind of industrial facility in the former coal community, one that will use waste rock from the Kennecott copper mine to help make low-carbon concrete.
Tuesday, Terra CO2 Technology has been selected to receive a $52.6 million federal grant to build a new manufacturing plant just west of Salt Lake City. The company devised a method which turns common minerals into additives that can help replace Portland cement – a key component in concrete, and one of the most carbon-intensive materials in the world.
“Most of what we’re focused on is reducing the carbon footprint of cement and concrete,” Terra CO2 CEO Bill Yearsley told Canary Media. “But it’s a unique situation at the Kennecott mine because it’s also an opportunity to reuse some mine waste … and provide some real environmental benefits.”
The Utah facility is one of 14 projects tentatively selected this week to receive $428 million in total grants from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. Funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the initiative aims to accelerate the production of clean energy in American communities with decommissioned coal facilities. Officials said the projects are expected to create more than 1,900 high-quality jobs in a dozen states.
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“The transition to America’s clean energy future is being shaped by communities filled with the valuable talent and experience that have come from powering our nation for decades,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Tuesday. news release.
The selected projects involve small and medium-sized enterprises focused on five key supply chains: low-carbon materials, grid components, batteries, clean power generation and energy-efficient products.
Along with Terra CO2, two other concrete-related initiatives are up for federal cost-sharing grants. Urban mining industries $37 million to develop plants in Baltimore and Indiantown, Florida, which are converting recycled glass in cement additives. Furno material could receive $20 million to build a Chicago facility that turns industrial waste materials into low-carbon cement.
The announcement comes as the world’s construction industry grapples with how to replace cheap, abundant Portland cement – which, as it happens, was developed 200 years ago this week, when British mason Joseph Aspdin cooked the first batches of the clay and limestone fusion in his kitchen.
Cement production accounts for about 8 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions each year. This is partly because cement is made in scorching gas-fired kilns, but also because the limestone used to make it releases CO.2 when it is burned.
Terra CO2 is working to limit emissions by developing supplemental cementitious materials, or SCMs, that can partially displace Portland cement used in concrete.
The industry already uses millions of tons of SCMs each year, both to reduce its products’ carbon footprint and to cost-effectively strengthen the material. But most SCMs today are made from fly ash and slag, byproducts of coal-fired power plants and steel mills. As more of those facilities close in the United States, driven by global competition and local climate policy, this material is becoming harder and more expensive to obtain.
Based in Golden, Colorado, Terra CO2 makes its SCM from a variety of silicate rocks, including granite, basalt, alluvial sand and gravel, and clay-sand blends. The company places these rocks in a reactor that heats them to their melting point, yielding glassy powders that can replace 25 to 40 percent of the Portland cement needed for different mixes of concrete.
Yearsley estimated that every ton of cement replaced by his company’s SCM results in 70 percent lower CO2 emissions, compared to pure Portland cement.
To date, Terra CO2 has made about $160 million in commitments from project finance partners to fund commercial-scale projects, and it has raised about $61 million in venture capital, including from mining giant Rio Tinto and Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
The startup is about to begin work on its first commercial facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. The project is expected to break ground in January 2025 and start materials by late summer 2026, Yearsley said. The facility will be capable of producing up to 240,000 metric tons of SCM per year when completed, or enough to serve approximately half of the local metropolitan market.
Yearsley said Terra CO2 was already considering building a second plant near Salt Lake City when the federal funding opportunity came up. The company worked with Rio Tinto to figure out how to use the Kennecott copper mine tailings as a feedstock feedstock for SCMs. Then they saw that the Department of Energy had identified Magna as a coal community, making it eligible for a cost-sharing grant.
“The stars have aligned, which doesn’t always happen for early stage companies,” Yearsley said. “The award is critical because it will help us deploy faster on a larger scale, and it will improve the economics,” though he noted that Terra CO2’s products are already cost-competitive “before green incentives.”
Yearsley declined to disclose the expected total cost of the Utah facility, which will also be capable of producing up to 240,000 metric tons of SCM per year. But Terra CO2 has already lined up financial commitments that should cover most of the project’s remaining capital costs, he noted.
“If we can have climate solutions that are cost-competitive for these bigger ticket items like concrete, that’s critical,” he said.
