Two low-carbon concrete startups will split the $15 million Carbon X-Prize

Oil companies see low-carbon concrete as a lifeline

The nascent low-carbon concrete industry got a $15 million boost on April 19, when the nonprofit Carbon X-Prize named two startups as winners of a five-year innovation contest to design profitable uses for captured carbon dioxide. The prize, sponsored by a group of power and oil companies, shows how the companies want to keep operating as pressure grows from governments, investors, and the public to cut emissions.

The global economy is still decades away from shuttering all power plants and industrial facilities that run on fossil fuels. In the meantime, carbon capture systems will be essential to drive down emissions from those sources and offset their historic greenhouse footprint. There are about 65 carbon capture facilities under development globally— mostly attached to gas-fired power plants, gas processing facilities, and factories for cement and other industrial products—but the technology has been plagued by the fundamental problem of what to do with CO2 once you capture it. If the gas is worthless, it’s impossible to justify the high upfront capital cost to capture it, and several early carbon capture projects have foundered as a result.

In recent years, the most common approach has been so-called enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in which captured CO2 is sold back to oil drilling companies to be injected into oil wells to facilitate drilling. But with drilling companies facing a bleak outlook for oil prices and looking to curb costs, the market for EOR is limited. The X-Prize was meant to spur the development and commercialization of alternatives; finalists included companies using CO2 to make plastics, carbon nanotubes, and industrial chemicals.

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