Clinker is about 90% of cement’s carbon, and the industry has been stuck between novel binders that cost too much and supplementary materials that are running short. Fly ash and slag are both constrained. On September 1 the Department of Energy put $117 million into 56 industrial projects, and four of them go straight at the clinker problem from four different directions.
Four low-clinker cement projects, roughly $11.8M
The awards came from DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation across nine topic areas, one of which covers advanced building and infrastructure materials. The cement and concrete line items run $2.9 million to $3.0 million each.
A University of Miami project in Coral Gables at $2.99 million targets a 60% to 75% clinker reduction against typical mixes using low-to-mid-kaolinitic calcined clays, portland-limestone cement and carbonated recycled concrete aggregate, with Ozinga Bros. and Illinois Institute of Technology as partners. Oak Ridge National Laboratory holds $2.89 million for limestone, activated clay and calcium sulfate blends that use mechanochemical clay activation, meaning grinding and milling rather than thermal calcination, with Carbon Upcycling, Irving Materials, Imerys, St Marys Cement, Tindall Corporation, PCI, the Tennessee Concrete Association, Georgia Tech and UT Austin on the team.
Solid Carbon leads a McMinnville, Oregon project testing belite-rich calcium sulfoaluminate and super-sulfated slag cements made with forest-thinning biochar and wastewater incinerator ash, partnered with Amrize and Wilsonville Concrete Products. UC Irvine, with De Nora Tech and Oak Ridge, is trying to replace the kiln outright with an electrolyzer running at significantly lower temperature to make calcium hydroxide. A separate topic area on electrification of industrial heat includes equipment testing for raw-material treatment in cement production.
The partner lists are the tell
Ozinga, Irving Materials, Amrize and Tindall aren’t lab spinouts. They’re ready-mix and precast producers who would actually have to batch this material, hold it to a spec, and place it on a schedule. That’s the difference between a paper on a promising binder and something a structural engineer will accept.
The clinker-reduction figures are project goals from selection abstracts, not demonstrated results. A 60% to 75% cut is a large claim, and the gap between a lab mix and an ASTM-accepted, spec-able product is where most low-carbon cement work has died over the past fifteen years. Still, three of the four attack the same lever with different chemistry, which is a reasonable portfolio bet for $11.8 million.
What it means for specifiers
Nothing changes on a job next month. But owners writing embodied-carbon targets into projects now are already forcing the question, and the supply side is the constraint. Mass timber has absorbed a lot of that pressure on the structural side, including in the learning wing at UW-Madison’s Phillip A. Levy Engineering Center, where a heavy research building got a timber component specifically to hold an embodied-carbon number. Concrete has no equivalent substitution available at volume, which is why the clinker fraction keeps coming back as the whole argument.
This was the second FY26 round from DOE’s Industrial Technology Office; the first, in May 2026, selected 20 projects at $52 million. Audrey Robertson, Assistant Secretary of Energy, framed the package around keeping American industry competitive. Non-cement selections include induction smelting of DRI-processed low-grade ores at the University of Minnesota Duluth, plus Nitricity, Louisiana State University and Protein Evolution. DOE’s announcement and its project-level selections list carry the detail.