The PCA presentations at the recent 2025 IEEE-IAS/PCA Cement Conference showed that despite our current construction slowdown, the appetite for cement in the United States will continue to grow, and the nation’s ability to meet that demand domestically is likely to fall short. Compounding the problem for the construction industry, supply chain constraints and high energy costs continued to create local pockets of scarcity and higher prices.
If we project out to 2050, the U.S. faces a significant materials supply gap, as much as 50 million tons of cementitious materials, half our current consumption. That is less than 25 years away. Permitting and building new cement plants can take a decade or more, and increased reliance on imports will be challenging to say the least, especially considering recent volatile trade dynamics.
In this environment, the cement and concrete industry must embrace a shift: we need to produce more with less. That means tapping into abundant resources that have been overlooked. Enabling the use of latent, alternative materials as Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs), implementing smarter, more circular supply chains and using cementitious binders more efficiently in concrete, will all play a role if we are to meet the country’s infrastructure and housing needs.
A key insight from leading academic researchers and Ecocem’s own Innovation Center scientists is that we’re not using clinker, the key reactive ingredient in cement, as efficiently as we could. In many hardened concrete specimens, a surprising portion of clinker particles remain unreacted. In addition, a significant portion of clinker minerals have low reactivity, providing later-age strength, but lacking the early-age strength development the market demands. This means wasted potential, as well as wasted energy and air emissions. Instead of producing more clinker, we must focus on doing more with less, using clinker smarter. That raises the question: are we on the wrong track with research into “low-carbon” clinkers? What if, instead, we aim for high-performance clinkers and cements—higher in calcium but requiring less clinker per volume of concrete due to their increased reactivity.
The premise for high-performance clinkers and cements is simple. Concrete requires a certain ratio of calcium to silica to stimulate the hydration reaction. Providing this reactive calcium in concrete is the highest-energy, most capital-intensive stage of the concrete supply chain. Using the available calcium to form the most reactive clinker compounds possible and then grinding them finer to produce high-reactivity cement makes it possible to transport less cement for use with local SCMs, mineral admixtures and recycled materials in order to produce concrete.
And this ability to use materials with much greater efficiency is essential. In an industry driven by logistics and proximity, it is these factors that will determine what new technologies can be adopted and applied to produce commercially viable products that enable the use of alternative raw materials such as industrial byproducts and wastes, including recycled concrete aggregates and fines.
Our ACT technology is the most efficient way to use clinker and SCMs and produces high-performance cements and concrete that deliver the durability, workability and strength required for any concrete application. This efficient use of materials addresses the logistics cost challenge, and because ACT is designed to work with a wide range of local materials as SCMs and mineral admixtures, it offers cement and concrete producers a new level of independence from imported materials.
The challenges are clear: supply is constrained, the ability of imports to provide the solution is uncertain and demand is growing fast. But the solutions are within reach—and are already being implemented today. By enabling the use of a wide range of industrial and mining byproducts and natural materials in concrete through beneficiation and activation, we are rethinking how we use clinker itself. In this manner, we cannot only solve the cement deficit but also reduce solid waste, air emissions, transportation costs, and drive meaningful innovation.
Ecocem’s focus on Research and Innovation in the last decade has delivered a range of low-carbon solutions for both common concrete and major infrastructure projects and prevented 18 million tons of CO2 emissions from ever being produced. Our latest technology, ACT, has cracked the scalability challenge, which has been associated with low-carbon cements and concretes to date. ACT delivers high-performance cement and concrete that can be produced at existing plants with local raw materials and uses current concrete job site work practices.
It is worth noting that ACT technology is not just about decarbonization. It is about resilient, efficient construction, avoiding increased demand on the electrical power grid and future-proofing the supply chain of an industry essential to America’s growth and vitality. Whether we use the language of low-carbon or not, the outcome is the same: using scarce raw materials more efficiently to deliver more value.
Get in touch if you would like to learn more.
In his latest blog, Ecocem’s award-winning research scientist, Simon Blotevogel, speaks about research on Electric Arc-Furnace (EAF) slags, collaboration being the key to innovation, and how we are at a critical moment in our mission to decarbonise the cement industry.
John Reddy, Director of Concrete Technology Deployment at Ecocem, reflects on his recent Webinar with the NEU, a center of excellence for carbon-neutral concrete established by the American Concrete Institute (ACI)