Cement maker Ecocem is close to a breakthrough, its chief executive, Donal O’Riain, hopes.
France, one its biggest markets, and home to two of the company’s plants, could approve its latest low-carbon product for use in concrete manufacturing around the middle of this year. Other European countries could follow into 2026, paving the way for the Irish company to produce the new cement and license others to use it.
According to O’Riain, the new product, ACT, cuts cement manufacturing emissions by about 70 per cent.
Making every tonne of the building material pumps 800kg of carbon dioxide, almost as much as the product itself, into the atmosphere. Consequently, a version that cuts those emissions by two-thirds ranks as the industry’s biggest breakthrough since the English stonemason Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement in 1824.
Ecocem’s latest product is the result of a €50 million investment over 10 years of research and development at its innovation centre in France. Essentially, the company stripped the two-century-old science behind cement production back to basics and reinvented it.
“We had to go to universities and hire young brilliant PhDs who worked in materials science and knew nothing about cement,” says O’Riain. “We said to them, ‘You look at cement from a fresh perspective and tell us what’s clever and what’s not clever’, and that’s why we jumped ahead of the cement industry: we tackled the problem with a fresh perspective.”
This should be a lifeline for the cement industry. Beginning next year the EU will begin cutting its free carbon allocation, eliminating it by 2034. This means that the industry will have to pay for the CO2 that it produces, with obvious consequences for costs and profits.
O’Riain explains that once a company builds a cement plant, it can produce a tonne for about €30, selling it for up to €130, as long as carbon costs nothing. But carbon costs €100 a tonne, boosting production costs to €110 a tonne, cutting deep into that healthy production margin.
“So, the industry now is faced with the reality of producing with CO2 as its biggest cost, and that’s going to oblige it to adapt its technology to look for lower-cost solutions, but lower-cost solutions come from lower amounts of CO2.”
So, presumably the industry is knocking down Ecocem’s doors at this stage? Well, it’s not that straightforward.
Since the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol first introduced binding emissions reductions in 1997, cement manufacturers have known they would have to deal with their industry’s greenhouse gas output. As no one believed this could be done through altering the production process itself, and manufacturers did not have the skills to do this in any case, it opted for carbon capture and storage.
That turned out to be expensive. O’Riain estimates that the bill for fitting the equipment to capture a million tonnes of the gas is about €500 million, while the process trebles production costs. The industry’s answer was to ask governments and the EU to step in with subsidies for the hardware needed and measures to stave off cheaper competition from external manufacturers not obliged to cut emissions.
This second measure is basically a tariff, called a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). This requires importers to pay the carbon cost of the cement they are bringing into the EU, so it is treated as if it were produced in the bloc, protecting producers from cheaper external rivals not paying emissions costs. O’Riain observes that Brussels seems to have heard both pleas, as it has committed €2.1 billion in subsidies to the industry for carbon capture and storage.
“This works if everyone uses the same technology and if those using it are protected by CBAM from the ones not using it,” he says. “So, everyone is happy, except for the end user: the construction industry and its customers, who have to pay for all of this. The industry can decarbonise because someone else is paying.”
As of now, some big players remain committed to carbon capture, or at least to securing the grants needed should they go down this route. But others are growing uneasy, as the cost of that technology continues rising, making them more willing to pay for carbon while stalling on investing in capture and storage.
That is only defensible if there is no cheaper technology, says O’Riain – in other words, if someone does not come along with a viable low-carbon alternative, which Ecocem has done. ACT costs no more than the widely used Portland cement, even though it is stronger and more durable.
Ecocem is not the only organisation saying this. Regulators agree also. The EU set a “norm” – a standard – for ACT in December 2023, allowing it to be sold throughout the bloc, once it complies with that standard, getting it over a first, very significant hurdle.
The second is harder to negotiate. Cement is a key component of concrete, but there is no harmonised EU standard for this material: each country sets its own. Consequently, Ecocem is talking to the authorities in each of its five main markets – France, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Republic – to get them to change the standards governing concrete production to allow ACT to be used for this purpose.
France is poised to move this year, and O’Riain is optimistic about ACT’s prospects in other jurisdictions. Ironically, Ecocem’s home country is proving slower to move. The National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI), the responsible body in the Republic, is “not rising to the challenge at the moment”, he says.
The authority has told Ecocem that it has no procedure to follow to change the concrete standard, so it first must write one, which is likely to take time. Alongside that, the body says that engineers in charge of each individual building project can decide to use ACT in concrete. O’Riain points out that this would involve going to each individual and convincing them to take on the new product, which is not feasible.
In any case, he argues that the NSAI has a procedure for changing the standard, as it has done so before. Like many others, he warns that the Republic faces enormous fines, up to €26 billion, if it misses 2030 emissions targets. Cutting cement and concrete production carbon output would contribute significantly to avoiding this.
“The Government and NSAI need to recognise that there is an urgency here,” he says. “They have to take on that challenge. The NSAI is capable of putting the same process in place. They have done it in the past, they can do it in the future.”
ACT works by cutting the amount of “clinker”, minerals that harden or set cement, and are responsible for much of the carbon dioxide it produces, by 75 per cent. Ecocem replaces this with other materials, including ground limestone, that are equally good at binding it, but cut emissions. O’Riain says the company believes it can ultimately cut out the remaining 25 per cent of clinker, but this will take some years.
Ecocem’s ratio of one in five or six staff working in innovation is high by any industry’s standards, let alone those of a conservative sector such as cement manufacturing
Getting it approved for use in concrete is critical as this is one of the most widely used building materials, particularly in big infrastructure projects. “That is the tipping point; that is the last barrier to wide deployment,” says O’Riain.
It is a global tipping point also. Cement production accounts for 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so he points out that cutting that by 70 per cent is a reduction of almost one in every 20 tonnes. “So, it’s not a small deal: it’s a globally important deal in the context of the planetary crisis that we face.”
As Ecocem guides ACT through regulation, the industry’s interest is growing. Greek manufacturer Titan this month signed a licensing deal to take on the Irish company’s technology. The family-owned group has a reputation for being well managed and innovative. It has businesses in southern Europe, Egypt and northeast US. Others are waiting in the wings.
Further along, big contractors are also interested in taking on the new product, pending regulators’ approval. One of its collaborators is the French construction giant Bouygues. It already does business with that group, along with the likes of Vinci and Eiffage. All three have global reputations in construction.
Working in partnership with the leading Irish contractor Sisk, and Capital Cement, Quintain and others, Ecocem recently completed a test structure using ACT in Wembley in London with the aid of €500,000 from Innovate UK, a British state body.
[ State building projects must now use low-carbon cementOpens in new window ]
Ecocem is taking a twin approach to getting ACT to the market. Its four plants have a combined capacity of 2.4 million tonnes, so, as O’Riain acknowledges, “we can’t decarbonise the European cement industry on our own”. Instead, it hopes to license the technology to other manufacturers.
Alongside this, Ecocem intends producing the new cement itself. In January it announced a €50 million investment jointly with CB Green, part of local building materials supplier Groupe CB, for its plant in Dunkirk, France. This is largely on the back of its optimism that regulators will approve ACT for use in concrete. That will give it capacity to produce 300,000 tonnes a year of the new cement, which should begin by the end of 2026.
“We’re prepared to put serious money behind it,” says O’Riain. “We’re going to have invest ourselves because we have to use it ourselves to have credibility before asking someone else to use it. If we want to extend that to the rest of the French market we need to follow that up with investment of another €150 million or so. And then €150 million more for the Netherlands and Belgium. We’re a long way away but we have taken the first decisive step.”
O’Riain, who is from Dundalk, Co Louth, trained as an electrical engineer at University College Dublin, going on to work for the ESB. He then moved to accountants KPMG, where he worked in management consulting before switching back to industry with Irish building materials group CRH, where he spent half a dozen years. He left more than three decades ago to work for himself, starting his own management consultancy.
O’Riain started Ecocem in November 2000 after he realised during his last stint in management consulting that he was helping businesses “to make lots of money”, so should start taking some of his own advice. Ecocem started making cement using blast furnace slag – waste – from steel making, cutting down the need for clinker.
It opened its first plant in the Netherlands, followed by a facility in Ringsend, Dublin. Ecocem had a “charmed life” until the financial crisis, which radically cut demand for building materials. It worked through that period with reduced profits.
Steel giant ArcelorMittal, its big raw material supplier, asked it to join forces on a plant in France, which opened at Fos sur Mer in the south of the country in 2010, followed by another facility in Dunkirk in the northwest. Arcellor remains a backer of the group’s French subsidiary. Other investors include French building materials group Saint Gobain and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a venture capitalist founded by former Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates.
Ecocem employs 230 people, which is likely to reach 250 by the end of the year. It has 40 staff in innovation, based mainly in France, with the rest in industrial or commercial. Group turnover was €232.4 million in 2023 and profits were €20.4 million. O’Riain’s son Conor runs the day-to-day business while he focuses on strategy and innovation.
The company’s ratio of one in five or six staff working in innovation is high by any industry’s standards, let alone those of a conservative sector such as cement manufacturing. It has been at that level for 10 years, since O’Riain realised that its raw material supplies could come under pressure as the steel industry moved to cut emissions and close the furnaces that provided the firm with slag, prompting him to look for alternatives.
That search has proved fruitful. Ecocem has applied for 22 patents in this area on the back of it, and has also arrived at a way of making its existing product, still the company’s mainstay, even more efficient. O’Riain is clear that the business is not going to stop there. “We have found that there is an awful lot of ground to cover,” he says.
CV
Name Donal O’Riain
Post Chief executive of cement manufacturer Ecocem.
Why is he in the news? Ecocem has made a big breakthrough in cement manufacturing that cuts its carbon dioxide emissions by 70 per cent.
Family Married, with three adult children and four granddaughters.
Interests He plays tennis at least once a week.
Something that we might expect He does not have much spare time.
Something that might surprise He’s teaching himself Spanish.
