Meta strikes deal to help bring a low-carbon cement plant to Missouri

Tech companies say they’re seeking low-carbon construction materials to limit the climate impact of their data centers. But very little clean cement or green steel is actually being produced in the U.S. today, and only in a handful of locations.

To tackle that dilemma, Meta recently struck a deal with Fortera to help the startup build its first commercial low-carbon cement plant, in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Fortera’s approach involves capturing carbon dioxide that’s emitted during other companies’ industrial processes and injecting the compound into cement, where the CO₂ stays trapped instead of being vented into the atmosphere.

On Thursday, Meta said it would buy environmental attribute certificates from Fortera that represent about 200,000 tons of cement from the forthcoming project, though the companies didn’t disclose financial terms.

By signaling its demand, Meta aims to help Fortera attract the funding needed to construct the facility. And the certificates allow Meta to claim the green credentials independent from where the firm is actually building data centers, since cement doesn’t typically travel far from where it’s made. Instead, the physical product will be sold to customers near the plant at market rates — without any of the extra costs involved with cleaner cement-making.

“That’s really the catalyst the industry needs to move from pilots to true commercial production,” Ryan Gilliam, CEO of San Jose, California–based Fortera, said by email. The firm also plans to sell certificates to Microsoft, which invested in the startup last year.

Certificates are a niche but growing strategy for heavy industrial firms that need customers in order to attract investors and lenders but don’t yet have much, if any, material to sell. 

Google and Microsoft have deals to procure certificates from Swedish firm Stegra, which is building a novel, multibillion-dollar steel mill in Sweden that will run on hydrogen made from renewable energy. World Energy, which makes alternative jet fuel, and Envision Energy, a producer of low-carbon ammonia, are also issuing certificates to help scale production. And initiatives like the Sustainable Concrete Buyers Alliance and the Center for Green Market Activation have emerged to develop shared standards and more formal systems for these tools.

“A multiyear commitment is what gets a cement plant financed,” Devon Lake, Meta’s head of net-zero strategy, said in a news release. ​“Our agreement helps Fortera move the Ste. Genevieve plant from plan to production, which means construction jobs and long-term manufacturing jobs in Missouri, and low-carbon cement available to builders well beyond Meta.”

Fortera is among a group of U.S. startups — including Brimstone, CarbonBuilt, and Sublime Systems — that are looking to enter a massive industry responsible for roughly 8% of the world’s planet-warming emissions. Every year, countries use more than 4 billion tons of cement, the key ingredient in concrete, to construct buildings, roads, bridges, and more.

Fortera operates a pilot plant in Redding, California, that can produce about 15,000 tons of cement per year and has provided material for projects with the cities of Berkeley and Santa Cruz, the California Department of Transportation, and Simpson University, which used the product for an academic building in Redding. The 2.5-year-old Fortera facility is next to an existing cement plant owned by partner CalPortland, whose massive kilns use high temperatures to convert limestone, or calcium carbonate, into the cement precursor calcium oxide. 

The CO₂ emitted by this process is then piped into reactors within Fortera’s facility and chemically bonded to a form of ​“reactive carbonates” made through a proprietary method. After additional refinement, these CO₂-infused carbonates become what Fortera calls ReAct cement — a product that the company says has 70% fewer emissions than industry-standard ordinary Portland cement.

Now, Fortera is preparing to scale up production by partnering with MLC, which turns limestone into the industrial material lime at a large facility in eastern Missouri. Fortera plans to build an adjacent plant that can produce 300,000 tons of cement annually using the lime company’s waste CO₂. For context, a standard plant makes 1 million tons per year. 

Gilliam said he expects it will cost roughly $150 million to build the new facility, which Fortera aims to bring online in 2028. 

“Getting a project like this built means a lot of dominoes have to fall, between corporate funding, project finance and debt, and anchor customers,” he said. ​“Meta is really one of those dominoes.”

Fortera is also lining up buyers for the physical cement, including the building materials company Ozinga, which plans to use material from the Ste. Genevieve plant across the Midwest. Ultimately, Fortera’s long-term goal is for Meta and other certificate-holders to purchase actual cement for their infrastructure projects. That will help determine where Fortera builds next.

“This is the moment we go from showing the technology works to showing it works at scale,” Gilliam said of the commercial facility. ​“A 300,000-ton plant is a fundamentally different proof point [than a pilot], and it’s the template for the plants that come after it.”