The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $3.2 million to Solar MEAD, a joint project headed by CEMEX, Sandia National Laboratories and Synhelion. The project aims to replace the use of fossil fuels with concentrated solar thermal (CST) energy in clinker production.
CEMEX and Synhelion have been collaborating to introduce CST in the cement production process, achieving the first successful laboratory-scale demonstrative pilot in 2022 by producing the first-ever solar clinker. Sandia Laboratories will contribute unique research facilities as part of the National Solar Thermal Test Facility in New Mexico, and offer subject matter expertise to help accelerate the adaptation of the technology to cement manufacturing.
“Cement produced with solar energy is an exciting technology with tremendous potential to reduce the carbon footprint of cement production,” said Fernando A. González, CEO of CEMEX. “Achieving our net zero carbon goal by 2050 will require relentless innovation such as this to discover and scale breakthrough technologies.”
“Few renewable technologies are capable of generating heat at the temperatures needed to process raw cement feedstock,” added Nathan Schroeder, Sandia researcher and principal investigator for the Solar MEAD project. “This project will advance our understanding of how to use concentrating solar technology to gather and deliver the heat to existing cement production facilities and will have crosscutting relevance to other ore processing industries such as refractory, ceramics, and battery production.”
The Solar MEAD project will investigate methods to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, lower process temperatures, and increase the efficiency of clinker formation using solar energy. The team will assess the conditions to maximize heat transfer to the raw cement mix.
“The project offers us the opportunity to use our sustainable technology to support the decarbonization of energy-intensive cement clinker production. This solution can have a huge impact on the industry and will help to pave the way towards net-zero. We are proud of contributing to this goal,” concluded Gianluca Ambrosetti, CEO and co-founder of Synhelion.
