Fortera is a San Jose, Calif., low-carbon cement maker founded in 2019, though its chemistry traces back to a 2007 discovery inspired by coral reefs. Its ReCarb process captures CO2 from a conventional cement kiln and mineralizes it back into a cement it sells as ReAct. The company says that product cuts emissions 70% and meets all six ASTM C1157 categories. Its only operating plant sits next to CalPortland’s kiln in Redding and makes about 15,000 tons a year. On Oct. 29 Fortera said Meta will buy certificates tied to roughly 200,000 tons of ReAct, backing a planned 300,000-ton plant in Ste. Genevieve, Mo. Microsoft’s already an investor. Scale is the open question.
There are two products here, not one, and specifiers keep conflating them. ReAct is a full replacement for Portland cement binder. ReAct Blend is a supplement, designed to be blended into ASTM C150, C595 or C1157 cements, or added to concrete at the batch plant. The second is the easier sale, because it drops into an existing mix design and an existing supply chain.
ReCarb is the process rather than a product: carbon emissions from a conventional kiln are captured and mineralised into cement, converting vaterite to calcite. The plant documentation and process overview sit on the technology pages.
Project-level reductions Fortera publishes, which are more useful than a headline percentage: 37% for a Microsoft project, 41% for Camp Wamp, 45% for UC Berkeley, and 46% for a Silicon Valley company. The UC Berkeley mix ran a total supplementary cementitious material content of 56%. DPR cites embodied CO2 cuts of up to 70% against ordinary Portland cement. The company also claims a path to a zero-CO2 cement when paired with a green energy source, which is a different and more conditional claim than the project figures.
Delivered volume is modest and the company does not hide it. Simpson University received 15 metric tons of ReAct. Microsoft is using ReAct Blend in concrete for a Redmond, Washington campus building. The Redding, California plant is the only one in operation. A 2021 partnership covered a 15,000 ton-per-year facility in Northern California, and a 2023 partnership covered a 400,000-ton full-scale plant.
Which makes the growth model the thing to watch. Fortera works through collaboration, partnership and licensing of its intellectual property rather than building every plant itself: Graymont for global deployment, MLC for the Ste. Genevieve plant, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund on the capital side.
The standards position is the credential that matters to an engineer of record. ReAct became the first low-carbon cement to meet all six ASTM C1157 performance categories, in 2025. The company does not publish an EPD or ACI acceptance on these pages, so a project requiring either should request documentation.
The timeline reaches further back than the company’s age suggests: the underlying cement discovery was made in 2007, inspired by coral reefs, and a first commercial product called Airock was manufactured with ReAct in 2014.
Sources: https://forteraglobal.com/, https://forteraglobal.com/about-us/, https://forteraglobal.com/react-product/, https://forteraglobal.com/recarb-plant/, https://forteraglobal.com/contact/
