Innovation, Legislation & the Future of Cement with Ecocem’s Eoin Condren

Hello everyone and welcome to the World Cement podcast with me, David Bizley, senior editor of World Cement. In this episode I am delighted to be joined by Owen Condron, Executive Director of Corporate Development, but Ecosem. Together we'll be diving into the topics of innovation, the impact of policy and legislation and of course some exciting new technologies as well. I just wanted to take a moment to remind you to register for World Cement. It's free of charge and gives you access to the latest issues of World Cement, both in print and online. Every issue comes packed full of regional analysis, technical articles, project case studies and the latest industry news. Simply head over to worldcement.com, click the magazine tab and register today. It's as simple as that, happy reading. Oh and lovely to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me looking forward to picking your brain over the course of this discussion. Thank you for having me excited to have that discussion. Excellent. Okay then, well let's kick things off with the topic of innovation. Innovation in cement production either through new processes, technologies or products. It's going to be key to reaching net zero. What would you say is Ecosem's approach to innovation? Yeah, well, I guess our approach to innovation is evolved over time. We're actually a 25 year old company as of this year. So we've been around for a quarter of a century, which is a pretty decent amount of time. We've only really gotten stuck into innovation really over the course of the last, let's say, 10 to 13 years. Before that, we are a great company at producing great products, but they tend to be historically without many bells or whistles around the edges. We've produced a good product that helps the cement industry and the concrete industry to decarbonize so much. It's a slag producer at the start, ultimately, but knowing that there would be challenges in terms of slag production or general decarbonization in cement and concrete industries and recognizing that about 10 or 15 years ago, Donald Rian, who's the founder of the company decided that we need to spend a lot more time effort and capital into research and innovation to ultimately not just find solutions that would work for Ecosem, but for genuinely scalable decarbonization solutions because we can get into this in a bit more detail, but a lot of the decarbonization solutions that have historically been out there for even longer than 25 years, they're great, but they tend to be quite narrow in their focus or quite narrow in terms of their ability to scale to genuine decarbonization potential and that's really been the focus of Ecosem's innovation projects over that sort of 10 to 15 years. It's not just finding solutions that can sort of set us apart from a small commercial point of view, but something that can really genuinely impact the industry and that's where we sort of put all our folks in effort. It's finding cost-effective, scalable solutions that we can ultimately drive through our own channels, but then ultimately find ways of driving into channels far beyond our existing reach today. Okay, excellent. So it would be fair to say then you're looking at sort of improvements both to existing products and processes, but as well as that you're thinking outside the box with entirely new approaches. Totally right. I mean, ultimately diving straight into it, decarbonization materials or certainly materials I can help with the decarbonization of the cement and concrete industries. We tend to already know what they are across the industry on a fairly broad basis already today. So they're already in wide use across various parts of the world and they're certainly not restricted to the many developing nations we'll ultimately use many products that have lower carbon footprint than the products that we use in this part of the world. So they exist and ultimately there's many ways that we can or many levers that we can pull to decarbonize the cement industry, but ultimately the most cost-effective and rapid way to do so is to try to reduce the amount of ultimately clinker in cement and ultimately that clinker that ultimately transfers into concrete is finding ways to minimize the use of that clinker. That's how we're going to be decarbonized as rapidly and as cost-effective as possible. And we as an industry are already well aware of the products that can help us to do that. We broadly classify these as SCMs, supplementary saboteurs materials, which would include GGS, Yash, Kassam Klazer, Arcane, more and more prominence, natural puzzlings. Obviously, everyone when they talk about the decarbonization of cement industry talks about natural puzzlings and points that are Roman amphitheaters, etc. And we know all of these products exist that the challenges in a world where either A, some of those products might actually just disappear off the face of the earth or certain parts of the earth and B, even in today's situation, there simply aren't enough of these to decarbonize the cement or concrete industries as much as we need them to. How do we find ways of ultimately using what we have today? I eat those materials that we've already mentioned. How do we use them A as efficiently as we possibly can to squeeze every little bit of potential out of them so we can decarbonize as much as we possibly can using those materials. That's one thing that we do at Ecosm. And the other is, even if we squeeze the pipes as much as we can, we still need to find other alternatives to clinker to bring them into the market as quickly as rapidly as possible can. So again, that's also what we do at Ecosm. We're out there searching for and trying to valorize new materials that might be able to either increase the potential of these low carbon alternatives to clinker or indeed replace them because some of them may just disappear or replace the earth as we said. So there's a lot that we need to do as an industry and we're taking it upon ourselves as best as we possibly can to try and accelerate that. We're in the lucky position that we are very strong financially. In that perspective, we've got a very strong underlying business and we've taken the strategic decision over the last number of years to repump as much of our resources back into research and development to accelerate what is and what allows for some great potential from bringing some of these new products to market as rapid as we possibly can do. Okay. Now, on the topic of new products and new materials, you were recently awarded four million euros from the European Innovation Council to develop electric arc furnace slag-based low carbon cement, which is quite a mouthful. Before we get into the technology side of things, tell us a bit about the process of working with an institution like the EIC. How did that come about? Yeah. Well, okay. So I never really introduced what I do at EIC. So I'm in any great detail yet, but I think point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially, I'm an executive director of corporate development, and that can mean many things to many people. But essentially, what I do is I am in charge of trying to figure out how we structure our business to allow us to grow as rapid as we possibly can into various geographies. That makes sense for us to do so. What that really means is making sure that we have money at our disposal or capital at our disposal to really expand and generate business opportunities into locations that we find interesting using materials that we find interesting and using them as a set of year-on as efficiently and as scalable as we can. To expand, we need money. And that's what I'm in charge of. And one of the most interesting places to look for capital, particularly for early stage technological development, our governments, whether they're national governments or super national governments like the EU or the DC. And so I set up a team a number of years ago to really try to delve into what might be available at a governmental level or an EU level to try to figure out how we can collaborate as closely as we can with the EU on some of the decolonization or industrial reallocation of capital that, you know, how do we partner with these folks to really bring new technologies to the fore? And it's been a journey. It's been a complicated journey. I think what we've really understood from Europe is it's got huge amounts of ambition, particularly Europe. And listen, we've also managed to get Grand Capital out of the UK, France, Ireland and other places where we're doing business. But particularly for the EU, there's huge resources at its disposal and it really wants to make the best use of that. And certainly for early stage technological development, like this EIC ground platform, there are quite specific and specific as good, which I'll explain for the reason for a wise good in a moment. But there are good specific opportunities that are out there that we have been able to chase. And this was one of them. And particularly as I said, for early stage technological development, that has really been a great boost to allow us to spend the time and dedicate the effort towards really collaborating with some great institutions to drive some of the technological development. Now, I said earlier on, it's a bit complicated. It's our relationship because what we tend to see up in the EU level particularly is that they spend a lot of money on these early stage things. And then unfortunately, oftentimes we've experienced that the capital kind of dries up at this sort of when you get to industrial scale. Sure. Particularly for technologies that may not be within certain, let's say, bandwidths or what is in the current political agenda or what order the case may be, which is ashamed because the EU does a really great job of getting technologies to a certain point and then to look, you know, it kind of drifts away. And you see that those same technologies are getting picked up by China and the USA, et cetera. But listen, that's a different subject. I think from our point of view, for this EIC hot finder challenge, there was a proposal put out for tender and again, the EU does a pretty good job of putting these out there and making sure the right people are aware of these. So the point where I think they got 401 applications for this particular application process. Right. Okay. And of which, I think there were 31 winners. And we were one of those, which is great. But they did a good job of getting it out there. As I said earlier on, they were quite specific about what they were requiring. We fell into a category where they were looking for new binder technology using materials that aren't currently in commercial use or industrial use. And that worked really well with some of the ambitions that we have within our research and innovation team. And it dovetailed quite nicely in that we were able to work with some of our existing partnerships across academia and industry to try to pull together what we believe is a really exciting project to bring electric arc for a slug into a valorised situation where it can be used as a cement to again, as I said earlier on, decarbonize the cement and concrete industries by replacing as much fingers we possibly can with these alternative materials. Okay. Excellent. Just sticking with the topic of the EU just for a moment longer, would you say the approach that the EU has when it comes to supporting innovation, at least from your perspective as a cement producer? Is that something that governments should be looking, the governments elsewhere should be looking to replicate? I know you mentioned that they can sometimes be this element of the capital suddenly disappearing when you're looking at industrial scale application. Yeah. Listen, what I was talking about there was, for instance, in the cement industry in particular, as I said, there's a lot of money going into early stage technological development to find alternative materials. And I think that's a really smart place to put capital, drilling into basics very briefly. There are only two real ways to decarbonize the cement and therefore the concrete industry. Over 90% of the carbon footprint of cement and of concrete comes back to clinker. And it's essentially impossible to really decarbonize clinker in its own right. There are these process emissions that are completely unavoidable when you ultimately decarbonize or when you essentially burn the calcine, the limestone, the kiln. So you can't get rid of those CO2 footprints associated with pinker. So there's only two things that you can realistically do. One is capture as much as the carbon as you can and we'll come back to that in a second or you try to find materials that can replace as much clinker as possible. So ultimately you produce less clinker, but we still have the ability to construct the road bridges, houses, homes, et cetera, that we need. Now, the part that we've chosen ecosystem and many others are choosing is to find ways to decarbonize through producing less clinker and replacing that clinker with these alternative materials. That being said, the EU, when it comes to the European innovation fund, and when I talk about industrial scale grant funding, that comes through the European innovation fund. And I think there's been over two billion euros allocated to the cement industry for the decarbonization of cement, and every single cent of that has gone to CCUS, right? And we're not saying that that's something that should not happen. I'm a firm believer that we need to pull as many levers as we can to decarbonize the industry. And it makes absolute sense to allocate a significant quantity of that towards carbon capture and stores. However, we do need to pull multiple levers, you know, and there's a reason in the air industry why we're focusing on solar and wind and geothermal and hydro and gas and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We need to pull as many levers as we possibly can because not everything is going to work. And not one thing is going to work for everybody all of the time. Part of the issue that we've historically seen is that was we get a great run of getting funding for the early stage development of these alternative materials. As I said, it dries up because of all this gets sucked into this vortex of carbon capture and storage. And all we're saying, all we try to suggest at a national level and a super national level is at least just put some sort of capital towards driving further into the industrial process, some of the innovations that you have already been funding, right? It makes any sense whatsoever. It's been a bit of a frustration for us, but what we are beginning to see is that the EU is now beginning to push some of that responsibility back down into the nation states. Uninclude the UK into that classification as well because we look at that as a whole, do you guys not party anymore, but it falls within that same purview. And so what we're seeing there is that at a national level, whereas at the EU level, you can see that they've got these sort of grand strategies and CCUS is smack bang in the middle of those grand strategies and it's allocating a huge amount of capital towards that. But when it gets down and so the responsibility gets pushed down to the national level, you can start seeing a little bit of movement where the nation states are beginning to see there's a factory about to be built in my backyard producing this type of product which can decarbonize through XYZ's means and it's going to happen or it's not going to happen based on our ability to help on that. They can feel it, if you know what I mean, and they can feel the opportunity and if it brings jobs and opportunity and ultimately helps decarbonize and ultimately helps feed into the national overall strategy or the super national overall strategy. That's a really good thing to do. For instance, once we've been unsuccessful at industrial scale, grandfathering at an EU level, we have been recently successful at national level. So for instance, in France, we were able to get a bit of ground capital for a plant that we're going to produce some of our other innovations out of. So it's complex. I'd love to learn so complex, but I understand your certain extent why that doesn't stop us from continuing to go to the EU and say, guys and girls, if you want genuine innovation to happen at industrial scale and ultimately, this is what China and the USA is really good at, industrial scale innovation. It needs to fund multiple levers and until that happens, we're going to keep banging on that door basically. Okay, so I guess this at least to the EU level is maybe an element of my opinion being dazzled perhaps by the big headline technology of carbon capture. Yeah, maybe I don't know. Listen, it's when there's an opportunity to say that this complex industry is going to get solved by this single technology and I get to then move on to other challenges in my life, be it my integration or wars or fuel or energy dependent, etc, etc. You know, I always try to put myself in their shoes to an extent and they're trying to deal with a massive array of challenges. Oh, absolutely. And things get political as well and there's a lot of things that they need to concentrate on. So if you can find a arguably simple solution, whatever, just back and move out to the next topic and in my radar, but ultimately, my whole thing is we, and again, I don't mean to bring this all the way back to the USA and China the whole time, but what the USA does really well or certainly historically did very well is concentrated on verticals. So they became experts in cement decarbonization. And as a result, they figured out ways of finding niches within that space that they should be backing and ultimately did back versus we've got this big and relevant technology that might suit loads of industries and let's just back that to the health as has been the case in the EU to an extent. You know, there's definitely learnings cross borders and cross continents that we need to take into our into account. It's an interesting variation in approaches. We will, I promise, move on to some of the technical stuff, but I noticed as well when I saw your announcement about the EIC award that the work your scientists have been doing was in collaboration with others, for example, the University of Toulouse. Broadly speaking, how important for ecosystem or do you think the industry generally are these kind of collaborations and partnerships? Are they going to be essential to developing the innovative new products we need in order to meet that zero? 100%. I mean, there are a number of threads to pull there. But ultimately, we at ecosystem and me person are big believers in science. And science, I guess, is where starts is the foundation of how we're going to make progress. And when I say progress, I don't just mean decarbonisation. Efficiency, making best use of our natural resources or any resources that are disposal, making things as economic as possible so that we can get back to building, which is something that we need to do a lot more of in the EU and the UK to really drive growth and prosperity. It all starts with science and foundation, but I've pushed upon this a number of occasions already, but it can't stop us science either. You need to get that into the market. There's no point, I've tried to move to extremes, sometimes to sort of relay my point, but what I try to explain is there's no point finding this magic piece of moon dust in space, in outer space that is a complete alternative to clinker with zero carbon footprint through whatever means. That's great, but if you have to fly up to the moon every every time to drive and get this stuff and it's going to cause an absolute fortune and it's absolutely not going to be scalable. So it's pointless. So well done to science for finding that piece of moon dust, but it's not really going to work in real life. That's kind of the other side of the coin. You have to work with science, but then you have to work with industry to actually find the processes and the ways that you can actually get this out into the market in a way that makes sense from a course point of view, because for better or for worse, not everybody is obsessed with decarbonization all every day of the week, but they are obsessed about putting the metaphor, putting bread and water on the table, you know, they need to be able to make money out of out of their jobs and out of the things that they consume. You need to have scalable solutions and that's where we try to not, we've got absolute top-class scientific relationships across the globe. We mentioned to lose there, but we've also got them in Brazil, North America, India, I was in India a few months ago, speaking to this really exceptional work that's been done out there from a decarbonization point of view. And this is happening all around us, but then I think that the great space that ecosystem tries to fill is connecting that into the market. And we can't do that alone. We also work with our industrial partners. And another partner in this project was our Sunmetalli. We've got a great relationship with our Sunmetalli. In fact, they're a shareholder in one of our subsidiaries within Ecosam. And we work very closely with them, not only as a supplier, but as a collaborator in some of our scientific endeavors. The group that we pull together here is reflective of how we think about how everyone needs to pull together scientific or innovative group processes, which is a mixture of the science and the commercial and the raw material and how that all works together and get pretty complex pretty quickly. But we're lucky that we've got a very strong and dedicated team of not just scientists at Ecosam, but scientists who can actually run projects as well. And the individual who was led this project from a team-making point of view and it is a scientist. He's an award-winning scientist from a seven-titious point of view, but he's also exceptional bringing teams together and he pulled together a great consortium of players that we're really excited to do some work with over the course of next couple of years on this project. Okay, fantastic. Now moving to the technical side of things, which is the moment then, I should perhaps have asked this a little bit earlier, actually. What exactly is different about electric arc furnace like compared to the conventional stuff that means it requires different treatment compared to a blast furnace like? Yeah, and it's a great question. I mean, if you had absolutely no backing or grounding in science and you were told that they essentially contained the same minerals and elements, you say, okay, they must therefore do the same thing. Calvary, no, it's not as simple as that. And so whilst EAF contains strong amounts or good amounts of calcium and ancillica, which essentially is quite similar to what's in GBS or GGBS today, unfortunately, because of the crystallized structures, they're simply not as reactive or anywhere near as reactive as GGBS. And so the beauty of GBS and GGBS is that with a bit of treatment at the early stages of the process, when it's in its mouse on stage and it gets crunched in a certain way, it can perform pretty well without a huge amount of activation or further processing. So that's one of the reasons why it's been such a successful material in being used for the last, I don't know, high long at this point, at least 40 or 50 years. Yeah. And the decarbonization movement has been not around that long. So it's been used for technical and performance reasons, but also it's availability and it's ease of use for a very long time. Whereas electric hard furnace like eight, it just hasn't been around that long and there's been no real need to valorize it in many ways. And because we've had all of these other materials on our doorstep, whether it's high or fly ash or kinkers, kinkers, this just magic material that unfortunately used a lot of CO2. So that's why we need to ultimately work away from it. But there's never been a need to really valorize. Yeah, yeah. But now digging into it and people are beginning to look at it. It's been a case of I'm sorry, just so everyone is aware, it was interesting. Blast furnace like the white steel is produced today. It's it's producing big, what are known as blast furnaces and that goes to various stages from iron ore to big iron all the way through to steel. And part of that byproduct of that is granulated blast furnace like or certainly blast furnace like which ultimately gets granulated and ultimately gets ground into ground granulated blast furnace like which is a great replacement for kinker in semantic concrete to to very high levels actually where available. Whereas the historic way the blast furnace like of producing steel consumes huge amounts of coal and produces huge amounts of CO2 and the steel industry is itself looking to move towards this DRI/electric arc furnace steel production process which uses reduction through hydrogen as opposed to reduction through coal. It's a lot less CO2 intensive and so the industry is slowly migrating in that direction and as a result there will be simply less blast furnace like available first to consume and more EAF like electric arc furnace like available. The challenge is that the electric arc furnace like is way less reactive in the way it is produced today than blast furnace like. That's not to say that it's impossible because as I said all the right constituents were there is how do we activate that and how do we get that moving in a way that we can turn it into the new blast furnace like and the great news is or certainly that the positive news is eight it's possible but B we're actually going to it's been projected that we're actually going to be producing more EAF slug in the future than we do B blast furnace slug today and which means that we'll be able to replace even more kinker with this EAF slug if we can valorize then we do do do today with blast furnace slug and we can also get into the efficient the hyper efficient use of that EAF slug to make it even more valuable again from a replacement point to view but listen short the summary is that it's got the constituents but it simply isn't as reactive today as blast furnace slug is. Okay, excellent. So once you've got the difficult bit worked out as it were it's potentially quite hugely scalable technology massively. I mean listen electric arc furnace slug isn't going to be constrained to the EU or to the UK this is happening worldwide and whilst a blast furnace produces steel and as a result of blast furnace slug will remain the same electric arc furnace slug is going to explode in terms of volumes over the course next year so yeah we've got a few choices we can either a producer like we do today and essentially turn it into a landfill which would be a crying shame when we do have the ability to valorize it as cement or we try to do that and reap all the benefits associated with that there's circular economy associated with that there's value to be taken out of us there's the CO2 element but also you've got to bear in mind that when you to produce a ton of clinker you have to dig up 1.6 tons of limestone and so the less clinker we need the better use we are making of our resources available to us and that is something that we need to increasingly focus on as a society and so we should absolutely be using the materials that we're already producing through other industrial processes to make sure that we're using less of everything else why wouldn't we? Okay, excellent and once sticking on the topic of technologies it was earlier this year I believe that you announced the first commercial production unit for your act low carbon technology can you tell us a bit about what act is and how it works and where it fits into that low carbon cement landscape? Yeah, absolutely so listen as I said earlier on there are two things that we as a society need to do to ultimately decarbonize cement industry as rapid as we can through the reduction of clinker and those two things are get as many of these new products to market so we've spoken about EAF slide but what we're trying to do in this project is also apply those learnings to copper slides and ferro nickel slides and ferro chrome slides and there are literally tens if not hundreds of millions of tons of these things produced every year so we need to get as many of those things to market as we possibly can either through ecosystem or wherever else maybe on the road to doing so the second thing and this is related to what you ask about now is with our act technology use those as efficiently as we possibly can okay so acts technology which has been developed by ecosystem enables the most efficient use of cementitious materials that has ever been done before and that is something that we're essentially basing our entire company around now so what I mean by efficient use of cementitious materials is ultimately we don't as a society consume cement we consume concrete now we if we can find ways of producing that same concrete with that same performance with the same workability but use a fraction of the amount of clinker and of these other alternatives to clinker that allows you to do a couple of things first of all by using less clinker you're producing less CO2 big tick in the box secondly if we're using our alternatives to clinker whether that's ggbs today fly ash tomorrow it's eaf slag or chrome slags or calcine clay if we're using those as efficiently as possible we're able to spread those volumes of those products over a much wider volume of end product which is concrete so we're making a much larger dent in the CO2 decarbonization efforts with respect to the construction industry if we have to spread those materials over a wider volume of product okay so ultimately act is about the efficient use of these products and it is a technology that allows us to do that we've had ecosystem got four existing facilities across Western Europe tour in France one is the Benelox one is in Ireland and we serve various countries around their whether that's for itself or Benelox or at the UK in Scandinavia it's a true now our first step into mass production of act is to produce some of the raw materials that are required to allow that hyper efficient use of those products and that is the first step on that journey is to put a production facility up in one of our existing plants in drumkirk in northern France which will allow us to serve the Paris region the northern France region the southern UK region the London region into Benelox even as well yeah so it made sense from a for various reasons to put our first step forward there but the great thing about act is that it now allows because you're using a cemetery's products more efficiently it now for the first time allows for these other SCMs to be used on a much much more scalable basis than has ever been achieved before so today for instance we use back to ggbs that that's widely used in this mountain street it tends to replace clinker on a one for one basis essentially through act technology you can triple that efficiency so instead of producing an equivalent of one for one cubes of concrete you're now producing three tons of concrete for that same amount of sly and that allows when you start applying that same theory across EAF and copper slags and yeah castline clay the amount of impact that you can produce across an industry or certainly at a scalable global level not just a local level but at a global level you can make massive impacts so we're saying that we can today get an immediate 70% reduction in the average CO2 cement and concrete through our act technology with existing materials with existing facilities and we're using our first industrial scale plant for act to prove that out so that we can hopefully convince the rest of the industry to follow suit as quick as they can okay excellent um no continuing this theme of discussing innovations one of the problems we often see around innovation in technologies the failure of policy or legislation to keep up with new developments you can just look at governments and copyright lawyers scrambling how to work how to legislate with AI that's a fantastic example of that kind of lag in terms of cement and building materials what challenges have you encountered when it comes to dealing with well-meaning but outdated standards and norms and how have you been able to work around those yeah listen you you've hit the nail on the head there with respect to the single biggest challenge with respect to cement and concrete and ultimately construction decarbonization I think let's start with the main thing that we also have to consider with respect to cement concrete and any construction material it needs to be safe right I'm saying in a building right now that I really don't want to fall down around my ears my kids are a school today though I hope it continues to stand but we widely should believe yeah yeah yeah I don't think any one would be necessary yeah disagree with that Colin so I think we can all agree that it's exceptionally important that we don't change things purely for even innovation or decarbonization it needs to always be a very strong reason for moving things for certain from a standards and what our point to do that being said standards and norms were set using not just you know old technology when I say technology the materials that are available back in the day and so the admixtures that may be available back in the day but also frankly the testing techniques that we're able to do today comparing like the microstructures that we're able to understand the acceleration techniques that we're able to say whether it's a regression analysis or material acceleration that we can predict to a very high degree what the performance of this product will be in 5 6 10 15 20 25 years time right so our ability to predict and show that a product is a product worth commercializing it has absolutely increased over the last number of years but standards haven't followed that same trajectory of pace of change and so there's a challenge there in that we need to help catch up with where science is taking us the second thing is that standards and norms are very disconnected there there's absolutely no reason to think to think that people in France or Germany or Spain make their cement or concretes differently than they do in the UK sure it's the or or Ireland you see these situations where this literally especially in Europe for concrete standards literally five to ten kilometers away from each other two times will not be able to use the same concrete because it hasn't been standard wise in one country but it hasn't the other that's just insane and they've got these suppliers the same probably the same workers but so there needs to be a much more harmonized nature of how we get these products into the market and then there's a couple of other things which I could jump into but like even at a very high level you can get your cement standardized at a super national level so we have our act technology essentially standardized through the various norms etc at a European level and that's great because we've got a cement that can be used everywhere in Europe however nobody just use a cement they use cement within concrete but we don't have it standardized within the concrete norms and so you can use two separate norms between cement norms and concrete norms and they meant of course time efforts that we and others have to go through to drive that through makes it really challenging exercise to convince people to actually undertake that time and effort you know and I managed to say listen there's easier things to do in my life and I'm on move on so as a result you just see the pace of change being really slow now again I think things are beginning to change for instance another great piece of policy that I'm a massive believer in at an EU level is that there's now going to be a course on carbon and I think that is a good thing and as a result the cement industry the concrete industry the construction industry is going to unless innovation happens is going to have to pay more for their products because they're going to be paying for high carbon materials. Now we as an industry and as a society need to accelerate low carbon materials through the markets so that we don't need to suffer that essentially inflation the whole point of this is to incentivize people to find lower carbon solutions which are scientifically possible and industrially possible but again if they get cold up in the standards and you can't actually get them to market all you're going to do is end up just putting a tape on society which is to pay for carbon when ultimately science is out there to drive this forward we need to get that access to market and that's where the stands and norms are incredibly essential to try and move them forward and it's complex and it's frankly a bit boring but there are really great people who are spending in a northern amount of time out there trying to make this happen and we need to back them to the Hilt. Absolutely agree. Now on that note then are there any regions or nations in your experience have been particularly forward thinking when it comes to adapting norms and standards? There are places that might serve as a good example for elsewhere or is this like a universal problem everywhere is dealing with this issue? Yeah it's an interesting one because this immense a very local industry and as a result our experience is relatively local so I can certainly talk very closely to Western Europe we've been looking very closely at the USA and as I said I was recently in India and we have some colleagues who've been recently to China etc as well so we've got a pretty good idea about what's happening around the world now what I would say is that the world looks to the developed nations to drive changes in standards and if and when the developed nations do that the order sort of sit or can take note and certainly try to make it work within their own constraints and so I think there is a leadership requirement coming out of Europe and the USA and sorry North America in general to really drive these changes in accelerations and how we think about norms and standards. Now as it relates to examples of where we've seen real change happening I have to say the UK's been really exceptional to observe over the course of the last couple of years I've got Flex 350 which is a very exciting development that we're following very closely not just for our own purposes and we're looking to bring some of our products through including act into the market through the Flex 350 but also what that allows us to do with going back to other nations across Europe so listen if the UK is able to do this and he has the ambition to do this and is putting the time and effort into finding ways to accelerate these new materials and products into the market there is absolutely no excuse for you not to be able to do that Europe in general okay and so you know similarly so in in in France we're pushing our act product through the what was known as the ATX and that essentially allows us to and by the end by the end of this summer I think we will now have a product that is essentially through our act our act product would be fully certifiable to be used in construction projects across France from a concrete point of view which is an exceptional achievement and to be able to push through and well done to France for allowing that to happen we've had to spend a lot of money time and effort on doing and working with my but you know as I says I can sort of understand it because of the huge importance but I think the main thing is if you can get a product through the market through a Flex 350 or through an ATX and its performance base as opposed to recipe based then you and it meets all the criteria then you couldn't say to the market it's up to you guys to decide if you want to adopt this or not we put it through the rigorous testing and if you guys don't feel to your expertise or private insurance that is worth pushing with it's just going to stay down the shelf but if you do believe in it and you do see a commercial rationale for driving towards it then you're going to see that fly and so we just need to make sure that was where staying on top of and and trying to figure out ways of bringing these things to market as is the case in the UK and the in France at the moment certainly what we're seeing then you're going to start seeing some real rapid change because all this sort of the space just opens up yeah the Americas don't really go job as well through C1157 protocol and India has some interesting changes happening out there as well same with Canada so I think the good news is that there is a movement beginning to happen I think it's all about acceleration at this point and we are a ambitious energetic company so we don't like things to move slowly and so we're constantly in people's ears trying to accelerate things forward but I think the great news is we're not sharing an vacuum these days there's a lot of people who are sort of backing it to try and forward as well excellent okay then and finally looking ahead where do you expect the next innovations to come from if you can look into your crystal ball in terms of low carbon cement so there's sort of any exciting prospects on the horizon yeah listen I think I mentioned it already but the reason why we're so exceptionally excited by this project and why Europe has backed us and frankly why massive industrial players such as Arstromatial scientists like F.E.H.S. and Toulouse are backing this project with E.A.F. is what it can do and the learnings that can be applied across a range of industrial byproducts to today we essentially only use as an industrial byproduct G.G.B.S. and fly ash and you've got tiny instances of other things being used but they are tiny I think what's really exciting here is that through this and no one needs to wait for E.C.O. sent and this project to come to its conclusion in a couple of years time people need to be out there to try to find valorization techniques to accelerate the reactivity of these things because as I said earlier on here there's no reason scientifically why these things can't work it's never made any commercial sense because you had this magic material called krinker which basically did everything that you wanted to do but if you can find alternatives to that krinker a it opens up the market to a wider range of low-cost construction because you no longer need to build massive kiln so think about what this does for the developing world I no longer need to lay down 500 million dollars of CapEx to build a kiln I can do this industrial byproducts from other things it's a huge opportunity and then if we can use them as efficiently as possible for me that the next step forward and without talking about our own book too much is finding other industrial byproducts that might be out there and also frankly the cast on clay movement which I'm excited by but I think it's got enough brain space at the moment people are fully aware that we need to accelerate that but certainly industrial byproducts cast on clay but then ultimately using them as efficiently as you can you know I always come back to this if you go to the USA drink a bottle of water and the thickness of those plastic bottles just blow my mind every time you go to Europe and we've got much thinner plastic bottles I can still carry my water around me I can still drink out of it but because we don't have the natural resources that the USA does we just have to be more efficient with our use of raw materials it's the same thing when you use anything more efficiently you can make more of it you can make it more cost efficient you can make it easier to use you're making more use of your raw materials like why wouldn't we use these more efficiently the efficient use of all of these new materials I'm really excited by it and it's a very big moment of change in the industry and you're seeing a lot of chatter about it we're having a podcast about and it's frankly it's not often that you could say that's a peeper from outside the industry but like the cement industry is a very exciting place right now and it's good to be part of it. Excellent so exciting times then yeah okay I think that about wraps things up for this episode thank you so much for joining me on that deep dive through this whole range of key issues facing the cement industry. Absolutely pleasure love what you're doing and it's important to get these masters out there because as I say it is an exciting time there's a lot happening but for those things to happen certain barriers need to be removed and we need to accelerate the pace of changes so happy to have it helps contribute in any way that I'm and for those of you who enjoyed this episode hopefully all of you good news there are more on the way so do keep an eye on your inbox and your notifications so you don't miss out on the next episode and please remember do support the world cement podcast by subscribing, rating and reviewing we really do appreciate your feedback thank you and goodbye for now. 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