“In short, decarbonization and CCU are not just compatible. They’re complimentary. And we need all the tools we can get to meet the scale and urgency of the challenge we face.”
-CarbonCure’s Vice President of Customer Success, Brad Vickers
This newsletter issue features an interview with CarbonCure’s Vice President of Customer Success, Brad Vickers, who joined the company more than a decade ago, developing, operationalizing and scaling CarbonCure’s technologies in prior roles that included Field Engineer, Director of Engineering and Head of Product. His tenure included the assembly and commissioning of CarbonCure’s earliest commercial systems across North America and Asia, and the launch of its carbon credit program in 2021.
CarbonCure Technologies is a fast-growing carbon utilization company deploying easy-to-adopt solutions that enable concrete producers to use captured CO₂ to produce reliable, lower carbon concrete mixes.
What is your origin story?
CarbonCure was founded in 2012 in Halifax, Canada, where the company’s headquarters remain today. Our founder Robert Niven had recently graduated with a Masters in Engineering from McGill University, where he studied the benefits of introducing CO₂ to fresh concrete. Knowing that CO₂ can be chemically converted to a mineral within concrete, Rob and an initial group of employees began developing early iterations of our solution. Since 2012, CarbonCure has commercialized scalable technologies that reduce carbon emissions while providing economic advantages to its concrete producer partners in more than two dozen countries
Can you describe what CarbonCure does in a very simple way?
CarbonCure pioneered the mineralization of captured carbon dioxide in concrete by injecting it during the mixing process. Immediately upon injection, the carbon dioxide (CO₂) chemically converts into a mineral and gets permanently embedded in the concrete. The mineralized CO₂ also enables concrete producers to adjust the amount of cement content in their mixes while maintaining the concrete’s strength with no meaningful impact on the concrete’s pH or performance.
This is a win-win solution as CarbonCure’s technologies permanently lock away the CO₂ that has been captured while also reducing the amount of (carbon-intensive) cement needed in concrete production.