Sublime Systems to build first commercial plant

US-based Sublime Systems has been awarded up to US$87m in funding by the US Department of Energy (DOE). The funding will be used to accelerate construction of Sublime’s first commercial manufacturing plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Sublime, which first launched in 2020, has scaled up its electrochemical cement manufacturing process to a pilot capacity of 250tpa at its plant in Somerville. The next step, the Holyoke commercial facility, will produce up to 30,000tpa of Sublime Cement™, without the use of fossil fuels. The new plant is due to be operational by 2026. Sublime’s electrochemical process extracts reactive calcium and silicates from an abundance of raw materials at ambient temperature to make ASTM C1157-compliant Sublime Cement, a drop-in replacement for ordinary Portland cement in concrete.

“Access to sufficient capital for industrial-scale demonstrations is the single biggest obstacle preventing breakthrough innovations from reaching the scale humanity needs to combat the climate crisis,” said Sublime Systems’ CEO and co-founder, Dr Leah Ellis. “The Department of Energy has cleared this obstacle through funding from OCED’s Industrial Demonstrations Program, embracing its unique role in supporting the deployment of the decarbonised technologies of tomorrow. We look forward to collaborating with them on funding our first commercial manufacturing scale-up, which will ship our clean cement while creating meaningful economic opportunities for the surrounding community.”

According to the company, Sublime has already secured capacity reservations of more than 45,000t of Sublime Cement that will be manufactured at Holyoke.