Cement Innovation with CURA

That's amazing.

And the fact that it is a drop in material so it can be easily swapped out is amazing.

But I have to talk about cost because it's a cost sensitive business.

So what are those types of challenges you're navigating right now? um it could be cost related it could be technical um but cost is a big one so just convincing people that new doesn't automatically mean that it's it's not risky so um how are you sort of navigating that space to incentivize people in terms of the business case how are you kind of explaining that to people to help bring this to commercialization

for sure i mean cost is ultimately the king it's it's what determines and makes or breaks a project and it's it's critical So we address cost through two ways, through reducing capex and reducing opex.

We are an electrochemical-based approach, using used electricity.

And typically, electrochemical-based approaches, like hydrogen electrolyzers, have been known to be very expensive or energy inefficient, cost expensive.

That's actually the complicated chemistry, I had to use it, that we developed at the University of British Columbia and that we're now commercializing at CURA, which allows us to operate at a much lower voltage than traditional water electrolyzers, meaning that we use less energy, so it's more energy efficient, and that means that our OPEX is less.

And so, especially in places like in Canada, where you can get access to cheaper renewable electricity, especially in off time use of, or non-peak pricing, we can take advantage of that and use cheaper electricity in a much more energy efficient way to produce cement.

Whereas if you're doing a thermal approach, you have a lot of waste of that heat to the environment.

It's just, you can insulate as much as you want, but there's always still going to be some waste.

So that's the OPEX piece.

On the CAPEX, because we are also like an electrochemical approach, you get economies of scale when you mass produce or mass manufacture.

Our technology looks more like a solar cell farm or a battery farm because it's electrochemical, so it's modular, and you can stack it up and build it modularly.

which means that you really get those economies of scale once you mass produce.

Think of like an iPhone or a laptop versus a massive chemical plant where you have to build big in order to make the unit economics work.

So because of that, the savings of both your OPEX and your CAPEX, we anticipate that we'll be able to meet the cost of traditional cement manufacture once we get to scale, but with 85% lower emissions.

And so in places like in Europe, where they're faced with the ETS, the emissions trading system and scheme, they're facing 75 euros per ton of CO2 that they emit in taxes every single year.

And then on top of that, with CBAM, the carbon border adjustment, if you want to sell into the European market, you too will receive a tariff on a high-emission good in order to protect our local industry.

And so Europe is really leading the way in regulating this.

In Canada, we do have industrial carbon pricing.

It's dictated by the provinces in different ways.

In Alberta, it's the tier system.

But despite geopolitically what's happening in the States and the retrenchment from climate there, the rest of the world is actually moving much more forward aggressively on climate and implementing these policies that are going to necessitate cement producers to decarbonize and necessitate project developers to find low carbon materials for their projects.

And that is entirely true.