Carbon Re, an industrial climate-tech company, uses artificial intelligence to decarbonise cement and other foundational materials, like steel and glass.
Energy-intensive industries, such as cement, steel and glass, account for over 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are one of the hardest sectors of the economy to decarbonise.
The current plan for these hard-to-abate industrial processes relies heavily on carbon capture and storage, a technology that will take decades to scale and increases the cost of these fundamental materials by as much as 60%. Carbon Re is already reducing emissions today and requires no new equipment.
Its innovative AI platform optimises cement production, cutting energy consumption and carbon emissions by up to 5%, potentially saving $1 million per plant annually.
“At a time of escalating fuel prices and increasing emphasis on CO2 reduction targets, there is an urgent need for action. Carbon Re is connecting the biggest challenge of our time – climate change – with the biggest opportunity – advances in AI.”
Transitioning today’s materials for a zero carbon future
Carbon Re combines world-class deep reinforcement learning – a field of artificial intelligence best suited to managing complex decision-making – and industrial sustainability expertise from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing and UCL’s Energy Institute. In 2021, Dan Summerbell, Buffy Price, Sherif Elsayed-Ali and Dr Aidan O’Sullivan founded Carbon Re with a mission to reduce global emissions at the gigatonne scale, starting with the cement industry.
It’s cloud-based platform, Delta Zero, uses machine learning to achieve operational efficiencies in energy intensive industries, such as cement production, reducing operational costs and carbon emissions to otherwise unachievable levels. Delta Zero enables immediate reductions in energy consumption, cost and carbon emissions, with no capital expenditure. Each installation of the software saves as much CO2 as taking 11,000 cars off the road.
Using AI to analyse a customer’s manufacturing data, Carbon Re recommends ways to cut emissions during cement production (or steel making, glass manufacture, etc.) by modelling the production environment and dynamically identifying the optimal process for the lowest possible carbon dioxide output and fuel use. Negating the challenge of model drift, the AI is continually retrained to match actual plant performance.
The company has deployed its Delta Zero platform in cement plants on three continents and their pilots have already prevented over 10,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalents, demonstrating the platform’s value to its customers.
Carbon Re Dashboard
Established in 2021 with support from a £1 million investment led by the Clean Growth Fund, the UK venture capital fund; the UCL Technology Fund and UCL Business Ltd’s Portico Ventures; the University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund, co-managed by Parkwalk Advisors; and Blue Impact Ventures, Carbon Re is the first university spinout to be jointly funded by both UCL and Cambridge.
In 2022, Carbon Re raised £4.2 million in seed funding to scale up the development and deployment of its novel technology. Planet A Ventures, a Berlin-based green tech venture capital firm, led the investment, with follow-on participation from Clean Growth Fund, UCL Technology Fund and Cambridge Enterprise.
Recently, Heidelberg Materials adopted the spinout’s technology to revolutionise kiln operations. Carbon Re’s AI technology, integrated with ABB Ability™ Expert Optimizer, has already led to significant improvements at Heidelberg Materials Česká republika Mokra plant. These include a 4.1% reduction in fuel costs, a 2% decrease in carbon emissions, and a 33% reduction in C3S variance.
Image Credits: Carbon Re
