An Introduction to CarbonCure’s Verified Carbon Dioxide Removal Program

Last year, CarbonCure released its roadmap for reducing annual carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from concrete by 500 million tonnes by 2030. Given the substantial carbon footprint embodied in our built environment, with concrete representing 7% of global annual emissions, achieving this goal is integral to meeting Paris commitments. We also know we can’t meet this goal alone, so we embarked on an effort to give stakeholders a direct stake in helping us achieve it. 

Today, we’re excited to share more about how we’re enabling companies to pursue their net zero goals by helping to drive the adoption of low carbon concrete through our newly approved Verified Carbon Standard Methodology for CO₂ utilization in concrete production.

Introducing our Verified Carbon Dioxide Removal Methodology

Finding high-quality carbon credits is notoriously difficult. Finding high-quality carbon removal credits is even more difficult. However, CarbonCure is an industry leader in establishing a methodology for this measurable, permanent, engineered carbon removal solution with a large carbon credit registry.

Companies and individuals looking to compensate for their hard-to-abate CO₂ emissions through carbon credit purchases often find these credits run into problems around measurability (whether measurements are accurate), additionality (whether this activity would have happened without their investment), and permanence (the duration of reduction or removal). These issues have constrained the growth of the market, hindering our ability to achieve the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement.

CarbonCure’s technology, along with our verified methodology, removes these constraints and addresses one of the leading sources of global annual CO₂ emissions in the following ways: 

• Measurability and verifiability: CarbonCure’s proprietary traceability application provides a real-time, visual representation of data generated from the entire carbon removal life cycle that is highly measurable and verifiable, starting from the source of captured CO₂, through to the site of carbon utilization (e.g. a concrete plant), all the way to the concrete’s end use (e.g. a construction project).
• Additionality: Today, less than 500 of the world’s 100,000 concrete plants use waste CO₂ in concrete. Our technology is not just new to the industry, but transformational through large scale deployment.
• Permanence: CarbonCure’s mineralization process is a permanent and cost-effective form of CO₂ utilization. Once injected into concrete, CO₂ chemically converts into a mineral permanently stored in concrete and is forever eliminated from the atmosphere. 

We collaborated with Verra, the world’s leading voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) program, to ensure that we translated our process into a unique, high-quality carbon credit offering as part of their Verified Carbon Standard (“VCS”) Program. The methodology is uniquely tailored to enabling the use of waste CO₂ to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete, and sets forth robust methodologies for quantifying reductions in carbon emissions as well as requirements to ensure quality factors like additionality and permanence are in place. Methodologies are critical to ensuring the quality of carbon credit purchases so that buyers know exactly what they are paying for.

Key Elements of our Methodology

CarbonCure’s technology provides GHG benefits in two ways: 1) by mineralizing captured CO₂ in concrete products, and 2) by slashing carbon emissions through the reduction of cementitious materials made possible by the strength protection via mineralized CO₂. The total GHG benefits are net of any additional emissions that occur through the use of our technology to create these GHG benefits. In summary:

Net GHG benefit = CO₂ mineralized (removed) + CO₂ reduced - process emissions

CarbonCure is uniquely able to quantify the net GHG impact in a highly accurate and transparent manner due to our proprietary traceability application, which provides robust measurement and verifiability across all key elements of the carbon life cycle. Further, ongoing monitoring isn’t necessary since both avoided and removed CO₂ emissions from our process are permanent, reducing monitoring costs while ensuring that our impact is durable.

Concrete as a Climate Solution

This methodology is a huge step forward for carbon emissions reduction and removal, as it opens the door for companies to accelerate decarbonization of the concrete sector, while achieving their own climate goals. Now, instead of contributing to CO₂ emissions, concrete can help eliminate CO₂ from the built environment.

For further information on our carbon removal program and to support the decarbonization of the concrete sector through the purchase of high-quality carbon removal credits, please contact us at carbonremoval@carboncure.com. 

To learn more about the VCS Program and the methodology for CO₂ utilization in concrete, visit verra.org.