Parker: Calgary firm Carbon Upcycling turns industrial waste into valuable cement products
Calgary-based Carbon Upcycling is making great strides in its mission to convert carbon emissions and industrial waste byproducts into valuable, local materials for low-carbon cement production. Its groundbreaking technology offers a productive solution for CO2 emissions and industrial waste materials by upcycling them into low-carbon supplementary cement products.
In the few years since it was launched in 2015, the company has attracted the interest of a large number of major cement companies and has forged a strategic partnership with TITAN Group, one of the world's leading international businesses in the building and infrastructure materials industry.
The companies entered a memorandum of agreement earlier this month to explore the commercial development of Carbon Upcycling's technology for producing local, low-carbon building materials. The collaboration builds on TITAN's earlier investment in the Calgary company and underscores both companies' shared commitment to accelerating the decarbonization of the building materials industry.
'Expanding the scope of our partnership with Carbon Upcycling from investment to project exploration aims to scale up production of innovative, high-performance cementitious solutions in line with our Green Growth Strategy 2026,' says Leonidas Canellopoulos, chief sustainability and innovation officer of TITAN Group. 'This initiative not only highlights the importance of localized production but also serves as an important model for integrating low-carbon solutions into mainstream industrial processes.'
The scientist with the vision of an inclusive, equitable world where carbon is a sustainable resource — shaping the future of humanity — is Apoorv Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Upcycling.
Born in Baha, a small province in the northeast area of India, he was brought up in Kuwait where his father had moved the family to work in the oil and gas industry. Sinha's education took him to the U.S., where he earned his chemical engineering degree at Georgia Institute of Technology.
He says he was attracted to Calgary as an energy hub with a reputation for innovation — a good place to build a business. In 2014, along with a couple of friends, they entered an Emissions Reduction Alberta challenge for the most innovative technologies that would convert CO2 emissions into valuable products.
The result was a $500,000 grant that kick-started the launch of Carbon Upcycling the following year, and the opportunity to work with researchers at the University of Calgary as well as others in university labs in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
Sinha says the research has focused on the use of local waste materials — ash, slag and clay-based tailings — that are found everywhere and can be chemically activated into a fine powder to be blended into cement. Burnco has become a valuable Calgary partner using the product from two Carbon Upcycle demonstration plants in the southeast area of the city, enabling it to reduce imported additives by using a local product.
Sinha and his team have kept up an aggressive momentum that has attracted a number of global partnerships with industry, academia and communities. Three of the world's largest cement manufacturers (TITAN, CRH and Cemex) have invested in the company, and following a $32.4-million Series A financing round in June 2023, private investments have reached $70 million. Another large investment is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
Currently a first-of-its-kind commercial facility is under construction at the Ash Grove cement plant in Mississauga, Ont., that will be able to use local feedstock from steel plants.
Carbon Upcycling has blossomed into a strong Canadian tech company built and commercialized in Canada, able to attract huge investments that will be beneficial to the local Calgary economy. It employs around 40 people here, consisting mainly of engineers, research and development, and operations, plus others in the U.S., Mexico, Belgium, Denmark and Germany — important since countries have different standards that locals are better to interpret.
To date, the company has secured 13 patents and filed for another 93 to protect its technology around the world.
While the G7 summit is being held at Kananaskis, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture is holding its agriculture and food security forum at Olds College with the theme of cultivating tomorrow's agriculture today. The 250 invited delegates will be at the forum and an additional 1,000 guests will attend online.
David Parker appears regularly in the Herald. Read his columns online at calgaryherald.com/business. He can be reached at 403-830-4622.
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