How Heidelberg Materials Turned Cement’s Biggest Liability Into a Moonshot

For most of its history, cement has been the unsexy backbone of construction. A commodity. Gray powder, sold by the tonne, judged on strength and price.

Then carbon math caught up with it. Cement alone accounts for around 7 to 8% of global CO2 emissions, more than aviation and shipping combined. Every developer chasing a net-zero pledge and every public client writing embodied carbon into their procurement eventually hits the same wall: you cannot decarbonize the built environment without decarbonizing cement. That is the bet Dominik von Achten took when he stepped into the CEO seat at Heidelberg Materials in early 2020, weeks before the world locked down. His former BCG colleagues told him he was crazy. He read the same facts in reverse.

Why cement is the construction industry’s biggest decarbonization lever

The math nobody can hide from anymore

Cement is the second most widely used product on Earth after water. It is also fully recyclable. The catch is the kiln. Producing clinker, the active ingredient, requires heating limestone to around 1,450 degrees Celsius, and the chemical reaction itself releases CO2 regardless of how clean your fuel is. That structural fact is why cement decarbonization has been considered a “hard tech” problem for two decades.

The industry has chipped away with the obvious moves. Substituting clinker with secondary materials. Switching from fossil fuels to alternative ones. In Europe, alternative fuels already supply roughly 60% of kiln energy on average. Useful, but not enough. To get the carbon footprint close to zero, someone had to crack carbon capture inside a working cement plant. Brevik is the first place that has happened.

The Brevik project: what actually got built

A 100-year-old cement plant with a chemical plant bolted on

The Brevik facility, on Norway’s southern coast, is two plants now. The original cement plant, running for more than 100 years, and a new carbon capture, conditioning, compression, and intermediate storage unit integrated on top of it. The capture technology comes from SLB Capturi (a joint venture between SLB and Aker Carbon Capture) using their Big Catch concept. CO2 is pulled from the flue gases of the kiln using waste heat recovered from the plant itself.

Captured CO2 is liquefied, temporarily stored on site, then shipped to Øygarden on the Norwegian west coast and piped to permanent storage beneath the North Sea via Northern Lights infrastructure. Brevik CCS was officially inaugurated in June 2025 by HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway after capturing its first 1,000 tonnes that spring.

Capacity is 400,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, half the plant’s emissions. The output is sold as evoZero, marketed as the world’s first carbon-captured net-zero cement. Heidelberg has already taken Final Investment Decision on a second facility at Padeswood in North Wales, designed to capture nearly 800,000 tonnes annually and target close to 100% of that plant’s emissions by 2029.

What it actually took to ship the moonshot

Three governments, two decades, and 400 people on site

The Brevik project did not start in 2020. Initial conversations between the plant (then called Norcem) and the Norwegian government go back to 2005. The project survived three successive governments, two socialist and one conservative. Any of them could have cut the funding. None did. Dominik took Final Investment Decision in late 2020, weeks into his CEO tenure, with significant funding support from Norway’s Longship program.

At peak, 400 employees and external partners worked on integration, racking up 1.2 million hours of precision engineering. The hard part was not the capture chemistry itself. Carbon capture is a known process in chemicals, steel, and power. The hard part was bolting a new chemical plant onto a 24/7 cement operation without disrupting production, and training operators who had never run anything like it.

Heidelberg’s answer was a digital twin. The project team built a virtual version of the plant and had the first 30 to 40 new hires, who called themselves “carbon capture nerds,” learn the process in what amounted to a computer game before any of them touched real equipment. Same playbook as aerospace and pharma simulation training, applied to a heavy industry plant for the first time at this scale.

The leadership lessons that translate to any heavy industry transformation

Technology is 30%. People are 70%.

Ask Dominik what made the project work and the technology answer is almost a side note. His estimate: the capture unit accounted for 30 to 40% of the project’s success. The rest came down to team composition and energy. That is a striking thing for a CEO of an engineering-led business to say out loud.

The team mix was deliberate. Experienced internal cement operators were paired with project managers recruited from oil and gas, where industrial carbon capture had already been proven at scale. Young hires, often without sector experience, brought the curiosity and pace that long-serving engineers tend to dial down over time. Hiring them was the easy part. Getting two cultures to work together without one suppressing the other was the discipline.

Dominik’s stated leadership default is to ask questions rather than give answers. He flags that engineers, in his experience, do not love risk or uncertainty, which is exactly what a first-of-its-kind project asks them to accept. The way through, in his view, is to push experienced people into roles slightly outside their comfort zone, complement them with outsiders, and protect the energy in the room.

From commodity to product: the commercial reinvention

Why selling net-zero cement is a different business

The technical project is one moonshot. The commercial project is another. Heidelberg traditionally sold cement the way you sell any commodity. Spot price, regional supply, long-standing customer relationships, modest margin. evoZero is not that. It is a branded, premium, carbon-captured product sold into a different buyer set: developers, infrastructure clients, and corporate occupiers building toward verifiable net-zero targets.

That shift required a sales force that did not exist inside the company. Heidelberg has been training existing teams and bringing in commercial people to sell on value, not tonnage. The product uses a mass-balance chain of custody model: every tonne of clinker produced at Brevik under CCS conditions carries 307.3 kg of CCS-related CO2 reductions, bundled as environmental attribute certificates attached to specific product volumes shipped to European customers.

For ConTech founders and investors, the read-across is clear. Heavy industry incumbents cracking a sustainability product also have to crack the go-to-market for it. Most are not built for that. The ones that are, like Heidelberg appears to be becoming, create the white space where premium materials, MRV software, embodied carbon platforms, and procurement tools can all plug in.

Heidelberg’s two CCS projects compared

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