Software company Microsoft is purchasing up to 623,0000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The company signed a contract with Sublime Systems to verifiably reduce construction emissions through a binding purchase of low-carbon cement manufactured with Sublime’s breakthrough technology.
The transaction enables Microsoft to use low-carbon Sublime Cement® over a six- to nine-year period. Deliveries will come from Sublime’s first commercial factory in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and its subsequent full-scale production factory.
Sublime’s manufacturing process avoids conventional sources of carbon emissions and other pollution, a “true-zero” technology that forgoes the need for carbon capture and thus enables cost competitiveness at full-scale production.
“In designing creative transactions such as this one with Sublime, Microsoft aims to accelerate the mass production and adoption of clean construction materials, enabling innovators to overcome the real, acute challenges of scaling in heavy industries with existing manufacturing capacity,” said Jeff Leeper, Vice President of Global Datacenter Construction at Microsoft, in a statement. “We need breakthrough, reimagined products like Sublime Cement at scale to reduce emissions — both at Microsoft and globally.”
Microsoft has secured a priority option to purchase and deploy Sublime Cement in its construction projects when geographically possible at its data centers, office buildings and other infrastructure. Through this novel contract, the environmental attribute certificates (EACs) of Sublime Cement can be purchased separately from the physical cement material — a similar mechanism to decoupling renewable energy certificates from the electron at the point of clean electricity production.
Microsoft’s purchase of Sublime Cement EACs will be third-party verified and is expected to be managed on a future book and claim system.
Sublime is currently developing its first commercial factory in Holyoke. With an up-to $87 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy, Sublime’s electrochemical process breaks down the entirety of its rock and industrial waste feedstocks, avoiding the pollution and waste that have characterized cement manufacturing for over 200 years while improving energy efficiency.