CURA Climate’s electrochemical cement process currently runs at five kilograms a day.
On September 17 the Calgary company closed a $10 million round led by Zacua Ventures to build a pilot plant that does 100 tonnes a year in Taber, Alberta, with precast partner Grand Forks Concrete. Sandpiper Ventures, Amplify Capital and Vantage Futures also participated. The same money funds engineering design for a first commercial demonstration facility at 30,000 tonnes a year.
That’s two orders of magnitude, twice, on the strength of a bench unit.
What the Electrified Cement Process Replaces
Making cement means decomposing limestone, and most of the carbon comes from that chemistry rather than from the fuel. CURA replaces the high-temperature combustion step with an electrified electrochemical process running on renewable power. The outputs are a concentrated CO2 stream ready for transport, storage or use, plus a low-carbon calcium product.
Two design choices matter more than the headline number. The carbon is captured before the kiln rather than at the stack, which changes the capture economics entirely. And the process accepts lower-purity limestone and industrial waste streams as feedstock, which changes where a plant can go.
Claimed reduction is up to 85% of cement emissions.
The Claims and What Backs Them
Not much yet, and that’s the stage rather than a criticism. The 85% is a projection from a process that has only run at five kilograms a day. No third-party life-cycle assessment is cited, no environmental product declaration exists, and there is no 100-tonne plant yet. Erin Bobicki, CURA’s co-founder and CEO, expects Taber commissioning in the first quarter of 2027.
CURA has signed MOUs with ACCIONA, Aecon and Titan Cement. Those are non-binding letters, not offtake agreements, and the difference is the whole business. BBA Engineering has the conceptual design study for the commercial demonstration plant.
Why Specifiers Should Track Low-Carbon Cement Anyway
Cement is roughly 8% of global CO2 and the world makes more than 4.5 billion tonnes of it a year. Every credible decarbonization path for the material runs through either carbon capture bolted onto a conventional kiln or a process change that avoids the combustion in the first place. The first is expensive and proven. The second is cheap in theory and unproven at any scale.
What makes CURA worth a line in the file is that it integrates with existing cement and lime infrastructure instead of asking anyone to replace a plant. If the Taber unit runs in early 2027, the number to watch isn’t the emissions figure. It’s cost per tonne against ordinary Portland delivered to a batch plant, on the kind of volume a caisson program like O’Hare’s Concourse D burns through in a season.
CURA is Canadian. The U.S. presence in this round is on the cap table: Zacua Ventures in San Francisco and Vantage Futures in New York.