1/21/2024 0 Comments Little giant skyscraper![]() ![]() The researchers began testing bacteria in petri dishes to see what they could come up with. ![]() “So if they could use local materials to produce hardened structures to protect troops and high-value military assets, that’s what they wanted to do.” “They knew they couldn’t fly in concrete because it’s too heavy, and they knew they didn’t want to truck it in over large expanses of hostile territory,” Burnett says. ![]() They’d received a $2.4 million grant from the Department of Defense’s research arm in 2017 to see if they could use biology to produce protective structures in deserts and other remote environments with difficult terrain. It’s ubiquitous.”įour University of Colorado Boulder academics, Jeff Cameron, Sherri Cook, Mija Hubler and Wil Sruber - all Prometheus cofounders and advisors - stumbled onto the idea while searching for a solution to a different problem. “Everywhere you look, you’re going to see concrete. “This problem is so huge it’s going to take all of us being wildly successful,” Burnett says of his company and its competitors. To bring the cement industry in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, its annual emissions would need to drop by at least 16% by 2030, even as cement production is slated to increase, according to a 2018 report by the London-based think tank Chatham House. “So if people think it’s just passenger cars and electricity, they’re going to miss what we need to do to get to zero.” “We don’t have a way of doing it that’s clean, that doesn’t cost dramatically more, more than twice the price,” he told NPR’s Marketplace in 2021. Cement is a major producer of greenhouse gasses both because of the chemical reaction that creates it and the fossil fuels required to heat the kilns where it’s produced. Gates, who wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, has called out the desperate need to come up with a cleaner and affordable alternative to cement to fight climate change. All three have gained more venture funding than Prometheus, with Brimstone raising $60 million, Biomason $87 million and Terra CO2 $99 million, according to venture-capital database PitchBook. Brimstone Energy is working to commercialize carbon-negative cement and is building a pilot plant near Reno, Nevada with backing from venture firm DCVC. Terra CO2, with a different low-carbon alternative to cement, has raised money from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. That helps explain why Prometheus is one of a number of startups now trying to tackle the hard problem of cement.īiomason, for example, has developed a similar way to grow cement bricks and tiles with bacteria. That’s a big number, but even if Prometheus reaches that goal it’s barely a drop in the bucket for the more than $300 billion global cement industry. ![]()
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