Brimestone

A Big Picture Problem 🗺️

The Quandary of Progress

The Dilemma

• Current State: Cement production accounts for approximately 7% of global CO² emissions, in part because of ever increasing global demands for energy, infrastructure and technology. Roads, buildings, dams, storage tanks and many more essential structures all require cement, and society needs to produce more cement to eventually create a renewable society.

• Complications: Cement production relies on limestone, clay, and other minerals. The manufacturing process involves heating these materials to extremely high temperatures, which triggers a chemical reaction called calcination. This reaction inherently releases CO², and accounts for about 60% of the cement industry's total emissions, which is much harder to get rid of compared to the remaining 40% of emissions that come from fuel sources to heat kilns.

• Consequences: Without significant decarbonization efforts, cement-related emissions will continue to increase and undermine global climate and emissions targets.

Searching For A Solution 📡

Brimestone

The Basics

• Mission: To accelerate the clean industrial revolution.

• Summary: Produce cement that is chemically and physically identical to conventional construction-grade cement, while eliminating carbon emissions from the manufacturing process.

• Year Founded: 2019.

The Framework

• Solution(s): Instead of relying on limestone, Brimstone uses calcium silicate rocks as the primary raw material in their chemical process. They chose calcium silicate rocks as their primary raw material because it is commonplace in every continent around the world, and this rock eliminates the CO² emissions associated with limestone calcination in traditional cement production processes.

• Strategy: Their methodology to build concrete with this material first separates the calcium, silicon, iron, aluminum and magnesium from the rock and later recombines them in a chemical reaction to produce both standard cement and other supplementary materials in a single production process. This integrated approach contrasts with conventional methods where cement and supplementary materials are typically produced separately and sourced from different locations, thus simplifying their supply chain and overall costs. Furthermore, the magnesium content in calcium silicate rock can be used to passively remove and permanently store atmospheric CO², which is how the company’s cement may achieve a carbon-negative footprint over the course of its lifetime under the right set of scenarios and circumstances.

• Signal: In March, Brimstone was awarded a grant worth up to $189 million USD from United States’ Department of Energy to build a commercial-scale plant to produce their green cement. They were selected for this award, in part, because their product meets the industrial standards and specifications to use cement for construction in many parts of the world.

The Team

• Founder(s):

  • Chief Executive Officer - Cody Finke.

    • Previously:

      • Postdoctoral Researcher @ Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

  • Chief Science Officer - Hugo Leandri.

    • Previously:

      • Staff Scientist @ Caltech.

• Headquarters: Berkeley, California, United States

• # Of Employees: 11 - 50

Click the button below to request an introduction to the founder

The Channels

• Socials: LinkedIn.

• Website: https://www.brimstone.com

• Resources: Watch this video to see Cody explain some of the industrial cement problems society is facing and why Brimestone is able to help governments and industries better than alternative options.

Risk Alerts ⚠️

The Threats

• Commercial Risk: Cement buyers evaluate products based on many criteria: cost, compressive strength, durability, workability, setting time, environmental impact. Long-term performance is particularly important because cement is used in structures expected to last for decades, if not centuries. Brimstone is at a disadvantage in this metric because they do not have long-term data on their product's performance in real-world conditions.

• Technical Risk: Whenever a chemical process attempts to scale up its production from a laboratory or pilot plant to an industrial level, unforeseen challenges in process efficiency, quality control, and equipment reliability emerge. Brimstone needs to overcome these inevitable scaling issues, which may require significant changes to their core processes.

• Comparable To:

  • Fortera.

  • Terra CO².

  • Sublime Systems.

Deal Tracker 🧮

The Cap Table

• Series: A.

• Raised: $244 million USD total.

• Investors: Led by the the grant from the United States’ Department of Energy. Lead investors are DCVC, Fifth Wall and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Participation from Climate Pledge Fund, Impact Science Ventures and others.

Market Insights 💡

The Landscape

• Recent News: The cement decarbonization sector has seen a surge in venture capital interest, with startups raising over $750 million USD in recent years. The majority of the space is still seed or Series A and early in their journeys, so the entire sector is needs to redress long-term performance questions about their products. Crunchbase.

• Growth Rates: According to a report by Fortune Business Insight, the global green cement market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.9% from 2023 to 2032, until it reaches a valuation of $66.4 billion USD.

• Ecosystem Dynamics: China produces and consumes about 52% of the world's cement because of the global supply chain’s reliance on its massive manufacturing sector and the blistering pace of the country’s industrial development. This creates a feedback loop where projects to grow, renew and revitalize the world fuels the nation’s cement demand, and the economic growth created by the additional cement production increases the capacity and resources for China to consume more cement to improve its own rural and urban communities.

Industry Trends 📊

The Indicators

• Catalysts: The introduction of carbon pricing mechanisms and other regulations in many countries are incentivizing cement producers and buyers to invest in low-carbon technologies. For example, the EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS) is a major tailwind for green cement in Europe, and California's SB 596 bill is another boon for the sector in one of the largest economies in the world. Furthermore, large government grants, like the aforementioned award that Brimestone won, are strategies employed around the world to accelerate green cement products to commercial viability.

• Challenges: The long lifespan of cement plants and the high capital costs to change chemical processes, replace energy sources and upgrade facility equipment creates inertia against rapid change. Also, since the green cement industry is relatively nascent, there are still ongoing debates about which decarbonization process will be the most promising and widely adopted in the end.

• Recommended Reading: Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway delves into why six materials — sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium — are critical to civilization, and how these different materials shape our world.

A Toolkit To Go 🛠️

The Equipment

• 📊 AVEVA - A data infrastructure platform to collect, analyze, and visualize real-time data from various industrial processes.

• ⚗️ Mat3ra - A computational system to design structures, simulate models and develop models of new materials and chemicals.

• 🗞️ The Aurorean Newsletter - Our team’s weekly roundup of STEM’s most significant stories of progress. We scour 100+ sources so you don’t have to.

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Share Your Thoughts 💬

The Community Wisdom

The results are in from our poll last week. Bedrock Ocean Exploration is a company on a mission to map and understand the world’s oceans with high fidelity and was over our horizon. The following is a snapshot of the sentiments our audience felt about them.

• Bulls 44%

  • Subscriber Perspective: 'Collecting a literal ocean’s worth of data at allegedly ≥ 20x higher resolution than traditional methods is a recipe for success when dealing with either public and private sectors. A key ingredient for their fate will be how they manage to organize this data to identify signal amongst so much noisey information via their software solution, but they are in pull position to build a sticky product that their future customers have been waiting for.’

• Bears 56%

  • Subscriber Perspective: ‘The engineering challenges here are extreme. The ocean is unrelenting and unforgiving, especially at deeper depths. What happens if their machines can’t handle the pressure (no pun intended) and it requires significant redesigns to accommodate for the unknown unknowns of the environment? How will they reasonably process and transform petabytes of data in useful ways? I like their strategy but many large companies struggle to do this, and I’ve seen countless promising startups sink trying to solve similar challenges.’