--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
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--:-- Noel King: Chris Bataille has spent almost 30 years studying energy policy. 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: What is his job job exactly? It's trying to figure out how to get rid of emissions in steel and cement.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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, you know, the weight-bearing structures of everything we have.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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 Krispies square, that dessert where you get the little Rice Krispies held together with marshmallows, the cement is the marshmallow.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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?
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: That, you know, 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: Typically, your cement factories are outside of town, right? Because in the past, they've been incredibly polluting.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: We burn that stuff in cement kilns to get to the temperatures we need. So in the past, they've been incredibly polluting.
--:-- Chris Bataille: After years of legal wrangling, finally, Lehigh Southwest Cement Company We'll be paying for dumping millions of gallons of toxic water into the bay.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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 where they get all their cement for everything you build.
--:-- Chris Bataille: I 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?
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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 in the last couple of decades.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: Now, they're getting to a point where they've got enough buildings, they've got enough bridges, they've got enough factories and what have you. So now a lot of those cement plants are kind of sitting idle.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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 emissions problem under control.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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?
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: Like, they'll 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%.
--:-- Chris Bataille: So that's the first step right there. The second step is that mineral I told you about earlier, that heated limestone, the 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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 thing, which is decarbonizing the production of the clinker.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: These are very conservative industries. They're conservative, A, because they don't, you know, something works, they don't want to mess with it. They don't want to be liable for anything that goes wrong.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: Build 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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, who 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?
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
--:-- Chris Bataille: 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.
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--:-- Noel King: Yeah, Patty, back it up, back it up. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Rick Fox played in the NBA for 13 years, ending his career with the L.A. Lakers in 2004. He then moved on to acting, for which he definitely has the face.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: And he's a co-founder of Partana, a company that makes clean or cleanish concrete. This, for him, is a very personal endeavor.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the Bahamas with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, with gusts going up over 200 miles per hour.
--:-- Rick Fox: Some 30,000 people were displaced. It's chaos here, and the place is uneniable. Nobody can live here.
--:-- Rick Fox: Thousands of homes were destroyed. In the battered northern Bahamas, massive piles of debris as far as the eye can see. People had died.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: It's something that no one wants to experience. And in the case of our country and our region, it's happening more frequently.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: This is beyond just the loss of a home. Many people have no way to recover.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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?
--:-- Rick Fox: It morphed into both. It started with the former, as you mentioned. I was not a climate technology entrepreneur to begin with.
--:-- Rick Fox: I come out of the entertainment space. Rick Fox? I knew 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: You at Partana have found a way to do this differently. What's this formula? What do you do that sets you apart?
--:-- Rick Fox: So our material is foundationally made up of large, big-scale industry waste. One product being brine from the desalination industry. The other product being slag from the steel industry.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: So we, in a direct air capture capacity without any use of energy, we get to concrete. A greener, fresher, cleaner, finished concrete.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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?
--:-- Rick Fox: Yes, right. So tell me about how you kind of, you have to use something, but the things that you're using are emissions heavy. Tell me a bit about that, getting your mind around that.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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 Partana was on the planet as a viable solution to our problem.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: Now you know how to do it. What is Partana building and where are you building? Where can I see this stuff?
--:-- Rick Fox: We built the first carbon-negative concrete home in the world, in the Bahamas. You can go and visit it.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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?
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: That affords anyone that's interested in building a sustainably green dwelling unit or home or building could use our materials.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: But we're in the U.S. as well. We're in the Caribbean. And we're in the Middle East right now.
--:-- Noel King: Leslie, 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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're leading in the space of carbon negative avoidance and removal.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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're actually delivering these materials today.
--:-- Rick Fox: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Rick Fox, co-founder of Partana.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Hadi Muwagdi and edited by Matt Collette and Amina El-Sadi.
--:-- Noel King: It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Isabel Angel.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
