Many MindedMeta becomes anchor buyer for a planned carbon-locking cement plant in Missouri
Meta has agreed to buy environmental attribute certificates from the startup Fortera, covering about 200,000 tons of cement from a planned plant in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Meta announced the deal on Thursday. The companies did not disclose financial terms. Fortera, based in San Jose, California, also plans to sell certificates to Microsoft, which invested in the company last year.
Fortera captures CO2 released by other companies' industrial processes and locks it into cement. The Missouri plant would sit next to MLC's lime facility and use that company's waste CO2. It would produce 300,000 tons a year, compared with roughly 1 million tons for a standard plant. The physical cement would be sold at market rates to nearby customers, with no added cost for the cleaner production. Ozinga plans to use it across the Midwest. Fortera says its ReAct cement has 70% fewer emissions than ordinary Portland cement, though that figure is the company's own claim.
The point is the financing structure. Cement makes up roughly 8% of global warming emissions, and countries use over 4 billion tons a year. A first-of-a-kind plant is hard to fund, and a buyer that pays for the emissions benefit separately lets the cement itself compete on price. Big data-center operators have the money and the motive to play that role, as Google and Microsoft have done with certificates from the Swedish steelmaker Stegra. If it works, low-carbon building materials could move toward scale, and costs could fall over time.
Watch whether the plant gets built. Fortera expects it to cost about $150 million and come online in 2028, but those are the company's expectations. They depend on funding, project finance, debt and anchor customers. Its pilot plant in Redding, California, opened in April 2024 and makes about 15,000 tons a year, so the jump to 300,000 tons is large. The source article's text was also truncated.
Source: Canary Media