Climate-Friendly Production of Cement: A Utopian Vision?

Cement is a mass construction material with large world-wide growth rates. At present its production contributes approximately eight percent of all global CO2 emissions (excluding the emissions caused by land use use change, and forestry). The cement industry has adopted many measures to reduce these emissions, such as technical improvements or use of secondary materials. In this article, it will be shown that these measures are not sufficient to stabilise or lower future CO2 emissions. CCS (Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage) is currently being discussed for further improvements in reducing CO2 emissions. However, instead of focussing on this end of pipe technology, which has not yet been realised at cement plants, the development of low-CO2 cements produced with substantially lower CO2 emissions would be a more sustainable course provided these innovative cements have the potential to replace conventional cement.