Fly ash supply has been tightening for a decade for a reason nobody in the concrete business disputes: coal plants keep closing, and a retired plant produces no ash. The ash already sitting in ponds and landfills is the obvious answer, and it has been the obvious answer for years. Getting it to meet spec is the hard part.
PHNX Materials opens a pilot on 9 September that will try. It sits on the grounds of the former Eastlake coal power plant on Lake Erie, it is called Jupiter, and it occupies between 200 and 300 square feet.
What the pilot is actually attempting
The process targets three output streams from coal combustion byproducts: cement-grade fly ash, critical minerals aimed at defense and semiconductor supply chains, and fertilizer. The Ohio Department of Development awarded PHNX $1,976,635 in 2025 to deploy the technology. Industrial Development Advantage owns the property and is the development partner. The run is scheduled for six months to a year.
Eastlake City Council member Kevin Kostelnik briefed council on 25 August and described it as the first coal ash refinery facility in the country. That is the company’s and the council member’s framing rather than an independently verified claim, and “first” claims in materials processing rarely survive contact with someone else’s press archive.
Read the scale before the ambition
A 300-square-foot process module is a proof of concept. It is not a supply. Cement-grade fly ash means meeting ASTM C618 on loss on ignition, fineness and reactivity, consistently, from a feedstock that has been sitting in a pond absorbing whatever the pond absorbed. The yield claim is a company claim at pilot scale with no third-party validation attached, and the state award, which is a hard number, funds deployment rather than certifying output.
What would make this interesting is not the pilot. It’s the second facility, and the first batch that a ready-mix producer accepts against a mix design without a variance.
Why the concrete side is watching anyway
Because the alternative supplementary cementitious materials are all constrained too, and because carbon accounting has made the ash question urgent in a way it wasn’t when ash was cheap and plentiful. Slag is tied to blast-furnace steelmaking, which is itself being replaced by electric arc capacity that produces none of it.
Contractors are already specifying around the shortage. At the Rapidus IIM-1 fab in Hokkaido, Kajima built with CO2-SUICOM, a concrete formulated to absorb carbon dioxide as it cures. That is a different answer to the same problem: if you cannot get the ash, change the binder. Pond reclamation and novel binders are competing for the same specification slot, and right now the binder side is further along.