The Swedish company CemVision is on a mission to make cement, an industry which stands for about 8 % of the emissions worldwide, green.
Two years ago, three former colleagues with long experience in the cement industry started the company CemVision, an industrial tech company with the vision to produce carbon-free cement. According to CemVision, the solution has the potential to reduce the cement industry’s global carbon emissions by up to 1 gigaton per year.
How it works
Scientists, sustainability experts and others have since the start in 2020 joined the team and is working on CemVision’s first product. The product is based on a technology where bi-products from other industries are made circular by upcycling them to replace fossil limestone. In traditional cement production, fossil limestone makes up about 70 % of the CO2 emissions and fuels about 30 %. To decrease the amount of emissions from fuels, CemVision intends to replace fossil fuels with fossil-free thermal energy.
International interest
The solution has gained international interest and in October 2022 it was announced that CemVision has been selected for the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, a programme started by the Bill Gates-founded initiative Breakthrough Energy. CemVision is one of 20 companies that have been selected worldwide. This means that the company will receive financial support from the Gates fund in the form of a favourable loan arrangement that only needs to be repaid if the innovation is successful.
The company has already secured 25 million SEK (About €2 300 000) from investors such as BackingMinds, Polar Structure AB, EQT Foundation and Swecem.
– Our long-term vision is to find cheap solutions for developing countries. It is difficult for them to change without social sustainability. If you don’t have food on the table and there is a lot of corruption, it is difficult to think about the climate. All resource-efficient initiatives in the field must be approved and encouraged, said Marcus Olsson, one of the three founders, to Ölandsbladet.
Sources: Ölandsbladet (in Swedish), DI (In Swedish), CemVision’s press release (In English)
