The demonstration carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at Heidelberg Materials’ Brevik, Norway, cement plant is now being commissioned following an official opening in June. At full-scale production of 400.000 t/y (or 55 t/h) of liquefied CO2, harvested in Brevik is taken by ship for final disposal under the North Sea, as part of the Norwegian government’s Northern Lights CCS projects. This site is the project’s three signed CO2 sources, which include a Hafsund Celsio waste-to-energy plant in Oslo and, in a second phase, ørsted and yara facilities elsewhere.
At Brevik, two kiln strings produce about 135t/h of intermediate product ‘clinker’, which makes Porland cement with the addition of a small quantity (5%) of gypsum.
Porland cement makes concrete, when combined with water, sand and aggregates. The core of the process involves pre-heating ground limestone and mixing it, with further heat, in a rotary kiln at 1,400℃, with sand, gypsum and slag. The so-called precalcination and calcination stages are the most energy-intensive and carbon-heavy phases of production.
To generate the intense heat required to calcine the cement, the plant itself burns a mixture of coal (about 20%) and alternative fuels, including bone meal, waste oil, waste anode dust, refuse-derived fuel and diesel for start-ups.
Project roundup
Air Liquide and EQIOM have joined forces in the European funded K6 project to make carbon neutral the cement plant operated by EQIOM at Lumbers, Pas-de-Calais, France. The project aims to capture around 8mn tonnes of CO2 over the first 10 years of operation. It would involve installing a first-of-kind oxyfuel-ready kiln, powdered with a high level of alternative fuel. Air Liquide will support this initiative by supplying oxygen to EQIOM’s production process and by leveraging proprietary Cryocap Oxy cryogenic technology to capture and liquefy the CO2 emissions. In JANUAREY 2024, EQIOM announced that it had launched phase one, involving constructing a new clicker line, to start production in 2026.
A UK project has won funding to develop a carbon capture pipeline between cement and lime companies in the Peak District to store emission below the Irish Sea. If built, the Peak Cluster project would prevent over 3mn tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere every year. £59.6mn equity investment in Peak Cluster announced in July is made up of £28.6mn from the UK government National Wealth and fund £31mn through a joint venture vehicle between Summit Energy Evolution (part of Sumitomo Corporation) and Progressive Energy Peak, as well as each of the Peak Cluster cement and lime producers (Tarmac, Breedon, Holcim and SigmaRoc).
In April 2025, Holcim, IGNIS P2X and Exolum announced that they had formed a strategic partnership to develop ECO2FLY, which aims to transform cement production emission into sustainable aviation fuel (eSAF). The new facility, located at the Holcim factory in villaluenga de la Sagra (Toledo, Spain), is designed to capture over 700,000 t/y of CO2 during cement production. Part of this CO2 will be combined with green hydrogen produced from renewable energy, to be converted into eSAF, reaching an estimated production of 100,000 t/y. The remaining CO2 will be stored permanently in geological repositories.
Google has signalled its confidence in fusion as a future clean energy source by making a second capital investment in Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS) of the US and signing what it says in the largest direct corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) for fusion-generated electricity to date.
The deal follows an earlier investment in 2021 in CFS-founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Financial terms have not been disclosed for either investment.
In addition to increasing its stake in CFS, Google has also signed a PPA for 200 MW of electricity from CFS’ inaugural ARC power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. CFS plans to connect the plant to the grid in the early 2030S. Google also has the option to offtake power from additional ARC power plants as they are developed.
At its core, fusion is the same process that powers the sun and stars. It involves taking light atomic nuclei and heating them to extreme temperatures over 100mm℃ at which point the fuel becomes a plasma. When it becomes dense enough, the nuclei fuse, releasing a tremendous amount of energy that can be captured to generated carbon free electricity. This is different from nuclear fission, a process that splits atoms to release energy.
CFS is currently building its SPARC (smallest possible, affordable, robust, compact) reactor at the company’s headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. It will use custom high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets in a doughnut-shaped fusion tokamak unit to heat two forms of hydrogen deuterium and tritium – which when they fuse (into an atom of helium) create continuous flow of highly energetic plasma contained within the tokamak’s magnetic field. This plasma releases energy that is captured as heat by a liquid ‘blanker’, which is then transferred to a steam turbine to generate power.