An event celebrated the first commercial application of a new type of low-carbon cement, made entirely in Massachusetts, and its use to build Boston’s largest net zero office building.
BOSTON (SHNS) – One phrase was uttered over and over again Tuesday morning by the movers and shakers of Beacon Hill and D.C.: Who knew concrete was so exciting?
The ceremonial opening for a new office building at 1 Boston Wharf Road in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood was unusually well-attended for a local ribbon-cutting, with attendees from high federal, state and local offices, including Gov. Maura Healey, Congressman Richard Neal, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Cabinet secretaries Rebecca Tepper and Monica Tibbits-Nutt and a number of White House representatives: President Joe Biden’s chief sustainability officer Andrew Mayock, special assistant to the president for climate policy Ben Beachy, and Robin Carnahan, administrator of the General Services Administration.
The event celebrated the first commercial application of a new type of low-carbon cement, made entirely in Massachusetts, and its use to build Boston’s largest net zero office building. The 707,000 square foot, 17-story mixed-use building features 630,000 square feet of office space leased to Amazon and a new performing arts center comprising two live performance venues with a total of 700 seats.
Somerville-based Sublime Systems was born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as more attention has been paid in recent years to how the built environment is contributing to climate change.
About 40 percent of emissions comes from the built environment, and in 2023, the production of cement accounted for 7 to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Sublime. Concrete is the most-used engineering material on the planet.
The company’s website boasts of a greener ready-mix and says Sublime’s process forgoes using a kiln, “which is the most energy and fossil fuel-intensive part of the cement manufacturing process.”
“Everybody here recognizes that the polluting way of making cement today is not sustainable. At Sublime we invented a new way to make the cement avoiding the CO-2 emissions, without the added cost and without the added complexity of carbon capture,” said Leah Ellis, CEO and co-founder of the company.
Healey, who singled out the company in her State of the Commonwealth address earlier this year, took the opportunity in front of an audience from the nation’s capital to tout the Bay State’s innovation economy.
“Low-carbon cement is going to help us decarbonize our global economy, and today, as we have so many times, the transformation is beginning right here in Massachusetts,” Healey said.
The governor also singled out Wu, praising her as “the nation’s climate mayor and a policy innovator in America’s innovation capitol.”
Sublime received $87 million in federal funding earlier this year through the Inflation Reduction Act. The grant came from the Industrial Demonstrations Program, which received $6.3 billion in the IRA, meant to “accelerate decarbonization projects in energy-intensive industries and provide American manufacturers a competitive advantage in the race to lead the world in low- and net-zero carbon manufacturing,” according to the Department of Energy.
Neal was one of the lead architects of the IRA, at the time serving as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where much of the bill was reportedly written.
“It is singularly the most important piece of climate change legislation in the history of the world,” Neal said of the law during Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The significance of it cannot be understated.”
He turned his comments touting the IRA and other climate change and infrastructure investment legislation, like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, towards reelecting someone into the White House that will “actually sign this legislation.”
Additionally, Neal highlighted that Sublime has plans to expand within Massachusetts.
The company is using some of the federal investment to create a manufacturing plant in Holyoke, and it recently announced an agreement with Vineyard Wind to reserve 2,000 tons of its low-carbon cement for use on the planned wind farm.
“In the city of Holyoke is an old building that nobody ever would have touched for decades, but for Sublime,” Neal said. “So, Holyoke, Massachusetts, a Somerville company, and Cape Cod wind. This is what we mean by the Massachusetts principle. This is a very important investment across our entire state.”
In her remarks, Administrator Carnahan said the federal government plans to use its purchasing power to incentivize and reward clean energy companies.
“We have the biggest real estate portfolio in the country and the biggest fleet of vehicles. So we also have money and momentum at the same time,” Carnahan said. “Our intention is to leverage our buying power as the government to help move the market in the right direction.”
The administrator said the GSA would give bidding preference to companies that are actively looking to drive down emissions.
“What that does is it sends a powerful signal to the rest of the marketplace, and we at GSA intend to put these products in our buildings,” she said. “It’s something where we test out these materials and products in federal spaces to show what’s possible. And if we can de-risk these new products, then they can take off throughout the market.”
New York last year became the first U.S. state to limit concrete in state-funded building and transportation projects — an example that Sen. Cindy Creem, chair of the Senate Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, encouraged Massachusetts to follow. Parts of legislation to develop uniform standards to reduce embodied carbon are tied up in ongoing House-Senate clean energy bill talks.
A Rep. Michelle Ciccolo and Sen. Jo Comerford bill (H 764 / S 2090), introduced for the first time last year, would establish a state advisory board to address embodied carbon, require the Department of Energy Resources to put forward recommendations and best practices for measuring and reducing the emissions, require a report outlining effective regulation strategies, and require the measurement and reduction of embodied carbon to be incorporated into the state’s building energy code.
The Senate bill received a favorable report from the Committee on Telecommunications, Utility and Energy, and got wrapped into the Senate version of a clean energy bill mainly focused on reforming the siting and permitting of renewable energy.