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In Episode 5 of the World Cement Podcast, Senior Editor David Bizley is joined by Eoin Condren, Corporate Development Executive Director for Ecocem. Topics covered include: the importance of investing in innovation, the role of policy and legislation in supporting next generation cement products, and a look at some exciting new technologies.
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The World Cement podcast: a podcast series for professionals in the cement industry.
Hello everyone and welcome to the WorldCement podcast with me David Bisley, senior editor of World Cement. In this episode, I am delighted to be joined by Eoin Condren, executive director of corporate development for Ecocem. Together we'll be diving into the topics of innovation, the impact of policy and legislation, and of course some exciting new technologies as well. Sorry for interrupting. I just wanted to take a moment to remind you to register for WorldCement.
David Bizley:It's free of charge and gives you access to the latest issues of World Cement, both in print and online. Every issue comes packed full of regional analysis, technical articles, project case studies, and the latest industry news. Simply head over to worldcement.com, click the magazine tab, and register today. It's as simple as that. Happy reading.
David Bizley:Eoin, lovely to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me and looking forward to picking your brain over the course of this discussion.
Eoin Condren:Thank you for having me. Excited to have that discussion.
David Bizley:Excellent. Okay then, well let's kick things off with the topic of innovation. Innovation in cement production either through new processes, technologies or products is going to be key to reaching net zero. What would you say is EcoSem's approach to innovation?
Eoin Condren:Yeah, well, guess our approach to innovation has evolved over time. We're actually a twenty five year old company as of this year. So we've been around for a quarter of a century, which is a pretty decent amount of time. And we've only really gotten stuck into innovation really over the course of the last, I'd say ten to thirteen years before that, you know, we are a great company of producing great products, but they tended to be historically without many bells or whistles around the edges. We've produced a good product that helps the cement industry and the concrete industry to decarbonize somewhat.
Eoin Condren:You know, it's it's it's a slag producer historically, ultimately. But knowing that there would be challenges in terms of slag production or general decarbonization in cement and concrete industries and recognizing that about ten or fifteen years ago, Don O'Rien, who's the founder of the company, decided that we need to spend a lot more time, effort, and capital into research and innovation to ultimately not just find solutions that would work for EcoSynth, but for genuinely scalable decarbonization solutions because and we can get into this in a bit more detail. But a lot of the decarbonization solutions that are have historically been out there, you know, for even longer than twenty five years, they're great, but they tend to be quite narrow in their focus or quite narrow in terms of their ability to scale to genuine decarbonization potential. And that's really been the focus of EcoSam's innovation projects. Over that sort of ten to fifteen years, it's not just finding solutions that can sort of set us apart from a small commercial point of view, but something that can really genuinely impact the industry.
Eoin Condren:And that's where we sort of put all our folks and effort. It's finding cost effective, scalable solutions that we can ultimately drive through our own channels, but then ultimately find ways of driving into channels far beyond our existing reach today.
David Bizley:Okay. Excellent. So it would be fair to say then you're looking at sort of improvements both to existing products and processes, but as as well as that you're thinking outside the box with entirely new approaches.
Eoin Condren:Totally right. I mean, ultimately diving straight into it, decarbonization materials or certain materials that can help with the decarbonisation of the cement and concrete industries, we tend to already know what they are across the industry on a fairly broad basis already today. So and they're already in wide use across various parts of the world, and they're certainly not restricted to the many developing nations. We'll ultimately use many products that have lower carbon footprint than the products that we use in this part of the world. So they exist.
Eoin Condren:And, ultimately, there's many ways that we can or many levers that we can pull to decarbonize the cement industry, but ultimately the most cost effective and rapid way to do so is to try to reduce the amount of ultimately clinker in cement. And ultimately that that clinker that ultimately transfers into concrete is finding ways to minimize the use of that clinker. That's how we're going to be decarbonized as rapidly and as cost effectively as possible. And we, as an industry are already well aware of the products that can help us to do that. We broadly classify these as SCMs, supplementary sanitizers, all include GGBS, fly ash, cast iron clays are, are getting more and more prominence.
Eoin Condren:Natural Puzzle Lands, obviously everyone, when they talk about the decarbonisation of cement industry talks about natural Puzzle Lands and points that are Roman amphitheaters, etcetera. And we know all of these products exist, but the challenge is in a world where either a, some of those products might actually just disappear off the face of the earth or certain parts of the earth. And and b, even in today's situation there simply aren't enough of these to decarbonize the cement or concrete industries as much as we need them to. How do we find ways of ultimately using what we have today I. E.
Eoin Condren:Those materials that I've already mentioned, how do we use them a as efficiently as we possibly can to squeeze every little bit of potential out of them so we can decarbonize as much as we possibly can using those materials. That's one thing that we do at EcoSem. And the other is even if we squeeze the pips as much as we can, we still need to find other alternatives to clinker to bring them into into the market as quickly and as rapidly as possible we can. So again, that's also what we do at EcoSem. We're out there searching for and trying to valorize new materials that might be able to either a, increase the potential of these low carbon alternatives to thinker or indeed replace them because some of them may just disappear off the face of the earth as I said.
Eoin Condren:So there there's a lot that we need to do as an industry, and we're taking it upon ourselves as best as we possibly can to try and accelerate that. Know, we're in the lucky position that we are very strong financially. In that perspective, we've got a very strong underlying business, and we've taken the sort of strategic decision over the last number of years to really pump as much of our resources back into research and development to accelerate what is and what allows for some great potential from bringing some of these new products to market as as rapid as we possibly can do.
David Bizley:Okay. Now on the topic of new products and new materials, you were recently awarded €4,000,000 from the European Innovation Council to develop electric arc furnace slag based low carbon cement, which is quite a mouthful. Before we get into the technology side of things, tell us a bit about the process of working with an institution like the EIC. How did that come about?
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Well, okay. So I never really introduced what I do at EcoSem in any great detail yet, but Good starting point. Yeah. Yeah.
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Essentially, I'm an executive director of corporate development, that can mean many things to many people. But essentially, what I do is I am in charge of trying to figure out how we structure our business to allow us to grow as rapidly as we possibly can into various geographies that make sense for us to do so. What that really means is making sure that we have money at our disposal or capital at our disposal to really expand and generate business opportunities into locations that we find interesting using materials that we find interesting and using them as I said earlier on as efficiently and as scalably as possible. Expand we need money and that's what I'm in charge of and one of the most interesting places to look for capital particularly for early stage technological development are governments, whether they're national governments or supranational governments like the EU or the EU.
Eoin Condren:And so I set up a team a number of years ago to really try to delve into what might be available at a governmental level or an EU level to try to figure out how we can collaborate as closely as we can with the EU on some of the decarbonization or industrial reallocation of capital that you know, how do we partner with these folks to really bring new technologies to the fore? And it's been a it's been a journey. It's been a complicated journey. I think what we've really understood from Europe is it's got huge amounts of ambition, particularly Europe. And and listen, we've also managed to get grand capital out of The UK, France Yeah.
Eoin Condren:Ireland, and other place where we're doing business. But particularly for the EU, there's huge resources at its disposal, and it really wants to make the best use of that. And certainly for early stage technological development like this EIC grant platform, there are quite specific and specific is good, which I'll explain for the reason for why it's good in a moment, but there are good specific opportunities that are out there that we have been able to chase, and this was one of them. And particularly, as I said, for early stage technological developments, that has really been a great boost to allow us to spend the time and dedicate the effort towards really collaborating with some great institutions to drive some of this technological development. Now I said earlier on it's a bit complicated, it's our relationship because what we tend to see at an EU level particularly is that they spend a lot of money on these early stage things and then unfortunately oftentimes we've experienced that the capital kind of dries up at this sort of when you get to industrial scale.
Eoin Condren:Sure. Particularly for technologies that may not be within certain, let's say, bandwidths or what is in the current political agenda or whatever the case may be, which is a shame because the EU does a really great job of getting technologies to a certain point and then tough luck. You know? Yep. It kind of it it kind of drifts away and and and you see that those same technology getting picked up by China and and The USA, etcetera.
Eoin Condren:But listen, that's a different subject. Think from our point of view for this EIC Pathfinder challenge, there was a proposal put out for Tender and again the EU does a pretty good job putting these out there and making sure people, the right people are aware of these to the point where I think they got four zero one applications for this particular application process.
David Bizley:Right. Okay.
Eoin Condren:And of which I think there were 31 winners, and we were one of those, which is great. But they did a good job of getting it out there. As I said earlier on, they were quite specific about what they were requiring. We fell into a category where they were looking for new binder technology using materials that aren't currently in commercial use or industrial use. And that worked really well with some of the ambitions that we have within our research and innovation team.
Eoin Condren:And it dovetailed quite nicely in that we were able to work with some of our existing partnerships across academia and industry to try to pull together what we believe is a really exciting project to bring electric arc furnace slag into a valorized situation where it can be used as a cement to again, as I said earlier on, decarbonize the cement and concrete industries by replacing as much pinkers as we possibly can with these alternative materials.
David Bizley:Okay, excellent. Just sticking with the topic of the EU just for a moment longer, would you say the approach that the EU has when it comes to supporting innovation, at least from your perspective as a cement producer, is that something that governments should be looking, governments elsewhere should be looking to replicate? I know you mentioned there there can sometimes be this element of the capital suddenly disappearing when you're looking at industrial scale applications.
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Listen, what what I was talking about there was for instance in the cement industry in particular, as I said, there's a lot of money going into early stage technological development to find alternative materials. And I think that's a really smart place to put capital. Drilling into basics very briefly, there are only two real ways to decarbonize the cement and therefore the concrete industry. Over 90% of the carbon footprint of cement and of concrete comes back to clinker.
Eoin Condren:And it's essentially impossible to really decarbonize clinker in its own right. There are these process emissions that are completely unavoidable when you ultimately decarbonize or when you essentially burn the calcite, the limestone, the kiln. So you can't get rid of those CO two footprints associated with pinker. So there's only two things that you can realistically do. One is capture as much of the carbon as as as as you can, and we'll come back to that to that in a second, or you try to find materials that can replace as much clinker as possible.
Eoin Condren:So ultimately, produce less clinker, but we still have the ability to construct the roads, bridges, houses, homes, etcetera, that we need. Now, the path that we've chosen EcoSem and many others are choosing is to find ways to decarbonize through producing less clinker and replacing that clinker with these alternative materials. That being said, the EU, when it comes to the European Innovation Fund, and when I talk about industrial scale grant funding, that comes through the European Innovation Fund. And I think there's been over €2,000,000,000 allocated to the cement industry for the decarbonisation of cement and every single cent of that has gone to CCUS, right? And we're not saying that that's something that should not happen.
Eoin Condren:I'm a firm believer that we need to pull as many levers as we can to decarbonise the industry and it makes absolute sense to allocate a significant quantity of that towards carbon capture and storage. However, we do need to pull multiple levers, know, and there's a reason in our industry why we're focusing on solar and wind and geothermal and hydro and gas and and etcetera etcetera etcetera. We need to pull as many levers as we possibly can because not everything is gonna work and not one thing is gonna work for everybody all of the time. Part of the issue that that we've historically seen is that whilst we get a great run of getting funding for the early stage development of these alternative materials, as I said, dries up because it all just gets sucked on into this vortex of carbon capture and storage. And all we're saying, all we try to suggest at a national level and a super national level is at least just put some sort of capital towards driving further into the industrial process some of the innovations that you have already been funding.
Eoin Condren:Right? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's been a bit of a frustration for us but what we are beginning to see is that the EU is now beginning to push some of that responsibility back down into the nation states. I'll include The UK into that classification as well because we look at that at EcoSemma as a whole. The UK is not part of the EU anymore but it falls within that same purview.
Eoin Condren:And so what we're seeing there is that at a national level whereas at a sorry at a EU level you can see that they've got these sort of grand strategies. CCUS is smack bang in the middle of those grand strategies and it's allocating a huge amount of capital towards that. But when it gets down and sort of the responsibility gets pushed down to the national level, you can start seeing a little bit of movement where the nation states are beginning to see there's a factory about to be built in my backyard producing this type of product, which can decarbonize through X, Y, Z means, and it's going to happen or it's not going to happen based on our ability to help fund that. They can feel it, if you know what I mean, and they can feel the opportunity. And if it brings jobs and opportunity and ultimately helps decarbonize and ultimately helps feed into the national overall strategy or the supranational overall strategy, that's a really good thing to do.
Eoin Condren:For instance, whilst we've been unsuccessful at industrial scale grant funding at an EU level, we have been recently successful at national level. So for instance, in France, we were able to get a bit of grant capital for a plant that we're going to produce some of our other innovations out of. So it's complex. I'd love if it weren't so complex, but I understand to a certain extent why that doesn't stop us from continuing to go to the EU and say, and girls, if you want genuine innovation to happen at industrial scale and ultimately, this is what China and The USA is really good at, industrial scale innovation, it needs to fund multiple levers and until that happens we're gonna keep banging on that door basically.
David Bizley:Okay so I guess this at least at the EU level there's maybe an element of myopia being dazzled perhaps by the big headline technology of carbon capture.
Eoin Condren:Yeah maybe I don't know listen it's when there's an opportunity to say that this complex industry is gonna get solved by this single technology, and I get to then move on to other challenges in my life, be it my integration or wars or fuel or energy dependent, etcetera, etcetera. You know? I I always try to put myself in their shoes to an extent, and they're trying to deal with a massive array of challenges
David Bizley:Oh, absolutely.
Eoin Condren:On the table. And things get political as well, and there's a lot of things that they need to concentrate on. So if you can find a arguably simple solution, yeah, whatever, just just back and and move on to the next topic in in my radar. But ultimately, my whole thing is we and again, I don't mean to bring this all the way back to The USA and China the whole time, but what The USA does really well or certainly historically did very well is concentrated on verticals. So they became experts in cement decarbonization.
Eoin Condren:And as a result, they figured out ways of finding niches within that space that they should be backing and ultimately did back versus we've got this big umbrella technology that might suit loads of industries, and let's just back that to the hilt, as has been the case in The EU to an extent. You know, there there's definitely learnings across borders and cross continents that that we need to take into our into account.
David Bizley:Okay. So interesting variation in approaches. We will, I promise, move on to some of the technical stuff, but I noticed as well when I saw your announcement about the EIC award that the work your scientists have been doing was in collaboration with others, for example, the University of Toulouse. Broadly speaking, how important for EcoSem, or do you think the industry generally, are these kind of collaborations and partnerships? Are they going to be essential to developing the innovative new products we need in order to meet net 100%.
Eoin Condren:I mean there are a number of threads to pull there, but ultimately we at EcoSam and me personally are big believers in science and science I guess is where it starts as the foundation of how we're going to make progress. And when I say progress I don't just mean decarbonisation efficiency, making best use of our natural resources or any resources at our disposal, making things as economic as possible so that we can get back to building, which is something that we need to do a lot more of in The EU and The UK to really drive growth and and prosperity. It all starts with science as a foundation but I've touched upon this on a number of occasions already but it can't stop as science either. You need to get that into the market. There's no point I try to move to extremes sometimes to sort of relay my point, but what I try to explain is there there's no point finding this magic piece of moon dust in in, you know, a space in outer space that is a complete alternative to clinker with zero carbon footprint through whatever means.
Eoin Condren:That's great, but if you have to fly up to the moon every every time to dry and get this stuff, and it's it's gonna cost an absolute fortune and it's absolutely not gonna be scalable. So it's it's pointless. So, you know, well done to science for finding that piece of moon dust, but, you know, it's not really gonna work in real life. That's kind of the other side of the coin. You have to work with science, but then you have to work with industry to actually find the processes and the ways that you can actually get this out into the market in a way that makes sense from a cost point of view because for better, for worse, not everybody is obsessed with decarbonization all every day of the week, but they are obsessed about putting the metaphor of putting bread and water on the table, you know.
Eoin Condren:They need to be able to make money out of out of their jobs and out of the things that they consume. You need to have scalable solutions and that's where we try to not we've got absolutely top class scientific relationships across the globe. You mentioned Toulouse there but we've also got them in Brazil, North America, India. I was in India A Few Months ago speaking to this really exceptional work that's been done out there from a decolonization or from a cement innovation point of view. And this is happening all around us, but then I think that the great space that EcoSem tries to fill is connecting that into the market.
Eoin Condren:And we can't do that alone. We also work with our industrial partners. And another partner in this project was Arsometall. We've got a great relationship with Arsimmetall. In fact, they're a shareholder in one of our subsidiaries within EcoSam.
Eoin Condren:And we work very closely with them, not only as a supplier, but as a collaborator in, in some of our scientific endeavors. The group that we pull together here is reflective of how we think about how everyone needs to pull together scientific or innovative group processes, which is a mixture of the science and the commercial and the raw material. And how that all works together can get pretty complex pretty quickly, but we're lucky that we've got a very strong and dedicated team of not just scientists at EcoSem, but scientists who can actually run projects as well. And the the individual who was led this project from a team making point of view and is a scientist. He's an award winning scientist from a cementitious point of view, but he's also exceptional bringing teams together.
Eoin Condren:And he pulled together a great consortium of of players that we're really excited to do some work with over the course of next couple of years on this project.
David Bizley:Okay. Fantastic. Now moving to the technical side of things for just a moment then. I should perhaps have asked this a little bit earlier actually, what exactly is different about electric arc furnace slag compared to the conventional stuff that means it requires different treatment compared to the blast furnace slag?
Eoin Condren:Yeah and it's a great question I mean if you had absolutely no backing or grounding in science and you were told that they essentially contained the same minerals and elements you say okay they must therefore do the same thing. Hell, if we know it's not as simple as that. And and so whilst EAF contains strong amounts or good amounts of calcium and and silica, which essentially is quite similar to what's in GBS or GGBS today. Unfortunately, because of the crystalline structures, they're simply not as reactive or anywhere near as reactive as GGBS. And so the beauty of GBS and GGBS is that with a bit of treatment at the early stages of the process, when it's in its molten stage and it gets quenched in a certain way, it can perform pretty well without a huge amount of activation or further processing.
Eoin Condren:So that's one of the reasons why it's been such a successful material in being used for the last, don't know how long at this point, at least forty or fifty years. Yeah. And the decarbonization movement has been not around that long. So it's been used for technical and performance reasons, but also its availability and its ease of use for a very long time. Whereas electric arc furnace like a, it just hasn't been around that long and there's been no real need to devout devout arise in in in in many ways.
Eoin Condren:And because we've had all of these other materials on our doorstep, whether it's mag or fly ash or clinker. Clinker's this just magic material that unfortunately uses a lot of CO two. So that's why we need to ultimately work away from it. But there's never been a need to revalorize EAF. But now digging into it and people are beginning to look at it, it's been a case of I'm sorry.
Eoin Condren:Just so everyone is aware, who's listening. Blast furnace slag, the waste steel is produced today. It's it's produced in big, what are known as blast furnaces, and it goes through various stages from iron ore to big iron all the way through to steel. And part of the byproduct of that is granulated blast furnace slag or certainly blast furnace slag, which ultimately gets granulated and then ultimately gets ground into ground granulated blast furnace slag, which is a great replacement for Thinker in cement concrete to to very high levels actually where available. Whereas the historic way, the blast furnace slag of of producing steel consumes huge amounts of coal and produces huge amounts of CO two, the steel industry is itself looking to move towards this DRI slash electric arc furnace steel production process, which uses reduction through hydrogen as opposed to reduction through coal.
Eoin Condren:It's a lot less CO two intensive, and so the industry is slowly migrating in that direction. And as a result, there will be simply less blast furnace slag available for us to consume and more EAF slag, electric arc furnace slag available. The challenge is that the electric arc furnace slag is way less reactive in the way it is produced today than blast furnace slag. That's not to say that it's impossible because as I said, all the right constituents are there. It's how do we activate that and how do we get that moving in a way that we can turn it into the new blast furnace slag.
Eoin Condren:And the great news is or certainly is that the positive news is, a, it's possible. But, b, we're actually going to it's been projected that we're actually gonna be producing more EAF slag in the future than we do b blast furnace slag today, which means that we'll be able to replace even more clinker with this EAF slag if we can valorize it than we do do today with blast furnace slag. And we can also get into the efficient the hyper efficient use of that EAF slag to make it even more valuable again from a replacement point of view. But listen, short, the summary is that it's got the constituents, but it simply isn't as reactive today as blast furnace slag is.
David Bizley:Okay. Excellent. So once you've got the difficult bit worked out as it were, it's potentially quite hugely scalable technology.
Eoin Condren:Massively. And listen, electric arc furnace slag isn't going to be constrained to The EU or to The UK. This is happening worldwide. And whilst a blast furnace produced steel and as a result, blast furnace slag will remain the same, electric arc furnace lag is going to explode in terms of volumes over the course of next year. So Yeah.
Eoin Condren:We've got a few choices. We can either a, produce it like we do today and essentially turn it into a landfill, which would be a crying shame when we do have the ability to valorize it as cement, or we try to do that and reap all the benefits associated with that. There's circular economy associated with that. There's value to be taken out of us. There's the c o two element, but also you got to bear in mind that when you to produce a ton of clinker, you have to dig up 1.6 tons of limestone.
Eoin Condren:And so the less clinker we need, the better use we are making of our resources available to us. And that is something that we need to increasingly focus on as a society. And so we should absolutely be using the materials that we're already producing through other industrial processes to make sure that we're using less of everything else. Why wouldn't we?
David Bizley:K. Excellent. And whilst sticking on the topic of technologies, it was earlier this year, I believe, that you announced the first commercial production unit for your ACT low carbon technology. Can you tell us a bit about what ACT is and how it works and where it fits into that low carbon cement landscape?
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Absolutely. So listen. As I said earlier on, there are two things that we, as a society, need to do to ultimately decarbonize the cement industry as rapidly as we can through the reduction of clinker. And those two things are get as many of these new products to market.
Eoin Condren:So we're talking about EAF slag, but what we're trying to do in this project is also apply those learnings to copper slags and ferronickel slags and Right. Ferrochrome slags. And there are literally tens, if not hundreds of millions of tons of these things produced every year. So we need to get as many of those things to market as we possibly can, either through Ecosam or whoever else may be on the road to doing so. The second thing, and this is related to what you asked about now, is with our axe technology, use those as efficiently as we possibly can.
Eoin Condren:Okay? So axe technology, which has been developed by EcoSem, enables the most efficient use of cementitious materials that has ever been done before. And that is something that we're essentially basing our entire company around now. So what I mean by efficient use of cementitious materials is ultimately we don't as a society consume cement, consume concrete. Now we if we can find ways of producing that same concrete with the same performance with the same workability but use a fraction of the amount of clinker and of these other alternatives to clinker that allows to do a couple of things.
Eoin Condren:First of all, by using less clinker, you're producing less CO two. Big tick in the box. Secondly, if we're using our alternatives to clinker, whether that's GGBS today, fly ash, tomorrow it's EAF slag or chrome slags or calcined clay. If we're using those as efficiently as possible, we're able to spread those volumes of those products over a much wider volume of end product, which is concrete. So we're making a much larger dent in the CO two decarbonization efforts with respect to the construction industry if we're able to spread those materials over a wider volume of product.
Eoin Condren:Okay? So, ultimately, ACT is about the efficient use of these products, and it is a technology that allows us to do that. We've, at EcoSem, got four existing facilities across Western Europe. 2 are in France. One is the Benelux.
Eoin Condren:1 is in Ireland. And we serve various countries around there whether that's France itself or Benelux or The UK and Scandinavia, etcetera. Cool. Now our first step into mass production of ACT is to produce some of the raw materials that are required to allow that hyper efficient use of those products. And that is the first step on that journey is to put a production facility up in one of our existing plants in Dunkirk in Northern France, which will allow us to serve the Paris region, the Northern France region, the Southern UK region, the London region, Inter Benelux even as well.
Eoin Condren:So it made sense for me for various reasons to put our first step forward there. But the great thing about ACT is that it now allows because you're using cemetitious products more efficiently it now for the first time allows for these other SEMs to be used on a much much more scalable basis than has ever been achieved before. So today, for instance, we use back to GGBS that that's widely used in the cement industry. It tends to replace clinker on a one for one basis essentially. Through ACT technology, you can triple that efficiency.
Eoin Condren:So instead of producing an equivalent of one for one cubes of concrete, you're now producing three tonnes of concrete for that same amount of slag. And that allows when you start applying that same theory across EAF and copper slags and cast iron clay, the amount of impact that you can produce across an industry or certainly at a scalable global level, not just a local level, but at a global level, you can make massive impacts. So we're saying that we can today get an immediate 70% reduction in the average c o two cement and concrete through our ACT technology with existing materials, with existing facilities. And we're using our first industrial scale plant for ACT to to prove that out so that we can hopefully convince the rest of the industry to follow suit as quick as they can.
David Bizley:Okay excellent. Now continuing this theme of discussing innovations, one of the problems we often see around innovation in technology is the failure of policy or legislation to keep up with new developments. You can just look at governments and copyright lawyers scrambling how to work, how to legislate with AI. That's a fantastic example of that kind of lag. In terms of cement and building materials, what challenges have you encountered when it comes to dealing with well meaning but outdated standards and norms, how have you been able to work around those?
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Listen, you've hit the nail on the head there with respect to the single biggest challenge with respect to the cement and concrete and and ultimately construction decarbonization. Think let's start with the main thing that we always have to consider with respect to cement concrete and any construction material. It needs to be safe. Right?
Eoin Condren:I'm sitting in a building right now that I really don't want to fall down around my ear because my my kids are at school today that I hope it continues to stand by
David Bizley:Pretty widely shared belief. Yeah.
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't think anyone would would necessarily disagree with that, Colin. So I think we can all agree that it's exceptionally important that we don't change things purely for even innovation or decarbonization.
Eoin Condren:It needs to always be a very strong reason for moving things or certainly from a standards and norms point of view. That being said, standards and norms were set using not just, you know, old technology. When I say technology, the materials that were available back in the day and the admixtures that may have been available back in the day, but also frankly, the testing techniques that we're able to do today compared to what we were in were like the microstructures that we're able to understand, the acceleration techniques that we're able to say, whether it's a regression analysis or material acceleration that we can predict to a very high degree what the performance of this product will be in five, six, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years time. Right. So okay.
Eoin Condren:Our our ability to predict and show that a product is a product worth commercializing has absolutely increased over the last number of years, but standards haven't followed that same trajectory of pace of change. And so there's a challenge there in that we need to help catch up with where science is taking us. The second thing is that standards and norms are very disconnected. There there is absolutely no reason to think to think that people in France or Germany or Spain make their cement or concretes differently than they do in The UK or Italy or Ireland. You see these situations where you just literally, especially in Europe for concrete standards, literally five to 10 kilometers away from each other, two towns will not be able to use the same concrete because it hasn't been standardized in one country, but it hasn't the other.
Eoin Condren:That's just insane. And they've got the suppliers, the same probably the same workers. But so there needs to be a much more harmonized nature of how we get these products into the market. And then there's a couple of other things which I could jump into, but, like, even at a very high level, you can get your cement standardized at a super national level. So we have our ACT technology essentially standardized through the various norms, etcetera, at a European level.
Eoin Condren:And that's great because we've got a cement that can be used everywhere in Europe. However, nobody just uses cement. They use cement within concrete, but we don't have it standardized within the concrete NORs. And so you've got these two separate NORs between cement NORs and concrete NORs, and the amount of cost, time, effort that we and others have to go through to drive that through makes it a really, really challenging exercise to convince people to actually undertake that time and effort. You know?
Eoin Condren:And and I just said, listen. There's easier things to do in my life, and I'm a move on. So as a result, just just see the pace of change being really slow. Now, again, I think things are beginning to change. For instance, another great piece of policy that I'm a massive believer in at an EU level is that there's now gonna be a cost on carbon, and I think that is a good thing.
Eoin Condren:And as a result, the cement industry, the concrete industry, the construction industry is going to unless innovation happens, is going to have to pay more for their products because they're gonna be paying for high carbon materials. Now we as an industry and as a society need to accelerate low carbon materials through the markets so that we don't need to suffer that essentially inflation. The whole point of this is to incentivize people to find lower carbon solutions, which are scientifically possible and industrially possible. But, if they get caught up in the standards and you can't actually get them to market, all you're gonna do is end up just putting a tax on society Yeah. To pay for carbon.
Eoin Condren:When ultimately science is out there to drive this forward, we need to get that access to market. And that's where the stands and norms are incredibly essential to try and move them forward. And it's complex and it's frankly a bit boring but there are some really great people who are spending an inordinate amount of time out there trying to make this happen and we need to back them to the hilt.
David Bizley:Absolutely. Agreed. Now on that note then, are there any regions or nations in your experience have been particularly forward thinking when it comes to adapting norms and standards? There are places that might serve as a good example for elsewhere, or is this like a universal problem everywhere is dealing with this issue?
Eoin Condren:Yeah. This is an interesting one because listen, cement's a very local industry and as a result, our experience is relatively local. So I can certainly talk very closely to Western Europe. We've been looking very closely at The USA. And as I said, I was recently in India and, and we have some colleagues who've been recently to China, etcetera, as well.
Eoin Condren:So we've got a pretty good idea about what's happening around the world. Now what I would say is that the world looks to the developed nations to drive changes in standards. And if and when the the development nations do that, the others sort of sit up and take note and certainly try to make it work within their own constraints. And so I think there is a leadership requirement coming out of Europe and The USA I'm sorry, North America in general to really drive these changes and accelerations in how we think about norms and standards. Now as it relates to examples of where we've seen real change happening, I have to say The UK has been really exceptional to observe over the course of the last couple of years.
Eoin Condren:They've got Flex three fifty, which is a very exciting development that we're following very closely, not just for our own purposes, and we're looking to bring some of our products through and including ACT into the market through the Flex three fifty, but also what that allows us to do with going back to other nations across Europe. So listen. If The UK is able to do this and he has the ambition to do this and is putting the time and effort into finding ways to accelerate these new materials and products into the market, there is absolutely no excuse for you not to be able to do that Europe in general. Okay? And so, you know, similarly so in in in France, we're pushing our ACT product through the what what's known as the ATEX.
Eoin Condren:And that essentially allows us to and by the end of by by the end of this summer I think we will now have a product that is essentially through our ACT our ACT product would be fully certifiable to be used in construction projects across France from a concrete point of view, which is an exceptional achievement to be able to push through and well done to France for allowing that to happen. We've had to spend a lot of money, time, and effort on doing and working with Miles, but you know as I says I can sort of understand it because of this the the huge importance. But I think the main thing is if you can get a product through the market through FX three fifty or through an ATEX and it's performance based as opposed to recipe based, then you and it meets all the criteria, then you couldn't say to the market, it's up to you guys to decide if you want to adopt this or not. We've put it through the rigorous testing. And if you guys don't feel to your expertise or private insurance that is worth pushing with, it's just gonna sit on the shelf.
Eoin Condren:But if you do believe in it and you do see a commercial rationale for driving towards it, then you're gonna see that fly. And so we just need to make sure that whilst we're staying on top of and and trying to figure out ways of bringing these things to market as is the case in The UK and the in France at the moment, certainly what we're seeing, then you're gonna start seeing some real rapid change because all of a sudden the space just opens up. Yep. I think America's done a really good job as well through c eleven fifty seven protocol, and India has some interesting changes happening out there as well, same with Canada. So I think the good news is that there is a movement beginning to happen.
Eoin Condren:I think it's all about acceleration at this point. And we are a ambitious, energetic company. And so we don't like things to move slowly. And so we're constantly in people's ears trying to accelerating things forward. But I think the great news is we're not shedding in a vacuum these days there's a lot of people who are sort of backing it to drive forward as well.
David Bizley:Excellent. Okay then and finally looking ahead where do you expect the next innovations to come from if you can look into your crystal ball in terms of low carbon cement. So there are sort of any exciting prospects on the horizon.
Eoin Condren:Yeah. Listen, I think I mentioned it already, but the reason why we're so exceptionally excited by this project and why Europe has backed us and frankly why massive industrial players such as Aristotle scientists like FEHS and Toulouse are backing this project with EAF is what it can do and the learnings that can be applied across a range of industrial byproducts. Today, we essentially only use as an industrial byproduct GGBS and fly ash. And you've got tiny instances of other things being used, but they are tiny. I think what's really exciting here is that through this and no one needs to wait for EcoStent and this project to come to its conclusion in a couple of years time, people need to be out there to try to find valorization techniques to accelerate the reactivity of these things.
Eoin Condren:Because as I said earlier on here, there's no reason scientifically why these things can't work. It's never made any commercial sense because you had this magic material called clinker, which basically did everything that you wanted it to do. But if you can find alternatives to that clinker, a) it opens up the market to a wider range of low cost construction because you no longer need to build massive kilns. So think about what this does for the developing world. I no longer need to lay down $500,000,000 of CapEx to build a kiln.
Eoin Condren:I can do this with the industrial byproducts from other things. It's a huge opportunity and then if we can use them as efficiently as possible. For me that the next step forward and without talking up our own book too much is finding other industrial byproducts that might be out there. And also, frankly, the cast iron clay movement, which I'm excited by, but I think it's got enough brain space at the moment. People are fully aware that we need to accelerate that.
Eoin Condren:But certainly, industrial byproducts, calcined clay, but then ultimately using them as efficiently as you can. You know? I always come back to this. If if you go out to The USA, drink a bottle of water, and the thickness of those plastic bottles just blow my mind every time. You go to Europe, and we've got much thinner plastic bottles.
Eoin Condren:I can still carry my water around me. I can still drink out of it. But because we don't have the natural resources that The USA does, we just have to be more efficient with our use of raw materials. It's the same thing. When you use anything more efficiently, you can make more of it.
Eoin Condren:You can make it more cost efficient. You can make it easier to use. You're making more use of your raw materials. Like, why wouldn't we use these more efficiently? It's the efficient use of all of these new materials.
Eoin Condren:I'm really excited by it. And it's a very big moment of change in the industry, and you're seeing a lot of chatter about it. We're having a podcast about it. And it's frankly, it's not often that you could say that to people from outside the industry, but, like, the cement industry is a very exciting place right now and it's good to be part of it.
David Bizley:Excellent, so exciting times then. Yeah. Okay Eoin I think that about wraps things up for this episode. Thank you so much for joining me on that deep dive through this whole range of key issues facing the cement industry.
Eoin Condren:Absolute pleasure. Love what you're doing, and it's important to get these messages out there because as I say, it is an exciting time. There's a lot happening. But for those things to happen, certain barriers need to be removed, and we need to accelerate pace of change here. So happy to have helped contribute in any way that I can.
David Bizley:And for those of you who enjoyed this episode, hopefully all of you, good news. There are more on the way, so do keep an eye on your inbox and your notifications so you don't miss out on the next episode. And please remember, do support the World Cement podcast by subscribing, rating and reviewing. We really do appreciate your feedback. Thank you, and goodbye for now.
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