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If you want to decarbonize concrete, it helps to understand the incredible scale of the problem.
To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is finally coming to grips with.
And yet the real problem with decarbonizing concrete isn’t the scale of its emissions, it’s the scale of concrete itself. There is simply a preposterous amount of the stuff. Contemplating concrete is like contemplating the universe — awesome, in the old God-fearing definition of the word.
Before we get into the jaw-dropping amount of concrete we produce every year, it’s worth briefly discussing how the stuff is made, and thus where its emissions come from.
Concrete is formed by mixing together cement (mostly calcium silicates), aggregates (such as sand and gravel), and water into a liquid slurry. The cement reacts with the water, forming a paste that binds the mixture into a single solid mass. Beyond concrete’s high strength and low cost, it’s these liquid beginnings that make concrete so useful. It can easily be formed into any shape and leveled with the help of gravity so you can walk on it or park a car 10 stories up on it. Essentially all modern concrete is also reinforced with steel bars, which provide tensile strength and arrest cracks.
So what about the emissions? Roughly 70-90% of the embodied carbon in concrete comes from manufacturing just the cement [1]. Partly this is because making cement is an energy-intensive process — limestone and clay are put into a kiln and heated around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s also because the chemical reaction that turns the limestone into cement (known as calcination) releases CO₂ as a byproduct. Roughly 50-60% of cement’s carbon emissions are due to calcination [2], and thus wouldn’t be addressed by moving to less carbon-intensive electricity sources, like green hydrogen.
Now for the good stuff. Again, the most important thing to understand about concrete is the scale of its production. The world produces somewhere around 4.25 billion metric tons of cement annually (though estimates vary) [3], which works out to about 30 billion tons of concrete produced each year [4].
How much are 30 billion tons?
One way of looking at it is we produce around 4 metric tons, or just under 60 cubic feet (roughly a cube 4 feet on a side), of concrete for each person on the planet each year.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount of mass, full stop, that civilization ingests each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year — including all mining, all oil drilling, all agriculture and tree harvesting — around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
Total civilization annual material extraction, via Krausmann et al 2018. This is up to 2015, and has now exceeded over 90 Gt/year, with another ~8 Gt/year of recycled material.
Another way of looking at it is that the total mass of all plants on Earth is around 900 billion metric tons. So at current rates of production, it would take about 30 years to produce enough concrete to exceed all the Earth’s plant (dry) biomass.
Because humans have been producing concrete for a while, and because concrete tends to last a long time, we seem to be on the cusp of this happening. Elhacham et al 2020 estimate that total human-created mass (roughly half of which is concrete) reached the total weight of all Earth’s biomass sometime in 2020. Eyeballing their graph, concrete alone will exceed the total weight of all biomass sometime around 2040.
Anthropogenic mass vs biomass during the 20th century, via Elhacham et al 2020
In a pure mass-flow sense, human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel (and to a lesser extent bricks and asphalt).
So civilization uses a lot of concrete. Where is it all going?
China, mostly. In recent history, China has been responsible for roughly half the world’s cement production, and by implication, concrete use [6]. The U.S., by comparison, only uses 2%, with Europe using another 5%.
Cement production by region, via Sanjuan et al 2020. Since cement production roughly tracks consumption (see here and here), we can also use this as a rough guide toward where concrete is used. Note that this gives yet another value for total global cement production of 4.65 Gt
Here’s another view from around 2010, showing what this has looked like over time (data after 2010 is a projection).
Cement consumption by region, via Altwair 2010
This gets summarized in the oft-repeated statistic that China used more cement in three years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
But since China has a much larger population than the U.S., we can get a more intuitive understanding of this by looking at cement consumption per capita. Here’s per capita consumption sometime around 2015:
Per capita cement consumption by country, via Globbulk
We see that the official numbers from China make it a huge outlier in cement consumption, using around eight times as much per capita as the U.S. However, in per capita terms, some Middle Eastern countries exceed it. Saudi Arabia is higher, and Qatar, which is somewhere over 2,000 kg/capita, is so high it doesn’t even show up on the graph. It’s the combination of China’s huge population and its huge per-capita consumption that make it such an outlier in concrete production.
The official Chinese numbers are so huge, in fact, that some analysts suspect that they’re inflated, either by manipulating the data or by producing construction projects that don’t have actual demand (or both). The graph above also includes a more “realistic” estimate (which is still 3x as high as U.S. per-capita use).
What does all this concrete construction mean in practical terms? Well, China has somewhere around 50-60% of the floor space per capita as the U.S. does, or roughly as much living space per capita as most European countries [7]. This is the result of a massive trend toward urbanization over the last quarter century. Urbanization rates went from around 25% in 1990 to 60% in 2017, a period in which China’s population also increased by 250 million. In other words, in less than 30 years over 550 million moved into Chinese cities, and they all needed somewhere to live. By building enormous numbers of concrete high rises, in under 20 years China quintupled its urban residential floor space and doubled its residential floor space overall.
Residential floor space in China over time, via Pan 2020
Beyond China, we see high per capita rates of cement use in the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East [8].
One reason you see this volume of concrete use in lower-income, urbanizing countries is that concrete construction is comparatively labor-intensive to produce. The materials for concrete are extremely cheap, and much of its cost in high-cost labor countries (such as the U.S.) is from the labor to produce it — building and setting up the formwork, laying out the reinforcing, placing the embeds, etc. If you’re a country with a lot of low-cost labor, this is a pretty good trade-off.
In addition to the current largest users of concrete, one trend to keep an eye on long-term is India’s concrete use. If India ever proceeds on a path of mass urbanization similar to China (as some folks speculate it will), we could see a massive uptick in global concrete output — India’s urbanization rate of 34% is around where China was in the late 1990s. A shift in India toward a per capita cement consumption more consistent with the rest of Southeast Asia (say around 600 kg/capita) would increase worldwide cement consumption by about 13%, and it does seem as if India’s cement use is trending upward.
By contrast, one thing clear from this data is that the U.S. actually uses an unusually low amount of concrete. Per capita, it uses as little as any other Western country, and far, far less than some — like, surprisingly, Belgium.
So we’ve seen where it gets used in the world. Can we go deeper and look at specifically what concrete is being used for?
This will vary significantly depending on the region and the local construction tradition. In the U.S., we have roughly the following breakdown (via the Portland Cement Association):
Overall, roughly half of our concrete gets used in buildings — about 26% goes into residential buildings, 2% in public buildings, and 16% into commercial buildings. The other half gets used for infrastructure — streets and highways, water conveyance and treatment tanks, etc. Because most construction in the U.S. is just one- or two-story buildings (mostly wood for residential buildings and steel for commercial ones), concrete in buildings is probably mostly going into foundations, slabs on grade, and concrete over metal deck, though there’s probably a substantial amount going into concrete masonry units as well.
But the U.S. has a somewhat unusual construction tradition, where the vast majority of our residential construction, both single-family homes and multifamily apartments, is built from light-framed wood. In other places, it's much more common to use concrete. For instance, the U.K. uses closer to 80% of its concrete for buildings, with most of that going toward the superstructure, the concrete frame that holds the building up. China, which has urbanized on the back of huge numbers of concrete residential high rises, probably devotes an even larger share of its concrete to residential construction.
Understanding how much concrete the world uses, and where it’s being used, is important if you want to use less of it.
The scale of the industry is particularly important to keep in mind. For instance, you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood [9], you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested [10], which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue.
Most other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.
Consider, for instance, railway ties. In the U.S., these are still largely made out of wood, but in many places they have been replaced with concrete ties. And some places are considering changing from concrete ties to plastic composite rail ties instead. It’s hard to know the exact embodied emissions without a lot of specific details about the materials and supply chains used, but can we ballpark how much a plastic tie uses compared to a concrete one?
Per the Inventory of Carbon and Energy database, concrete varies between 150 and 400 kg of embodied CO2 per cubic meter, depending on the properties of the mix, with an “average” value of about 250. Plastics mostly have embodied emissions of about 3-4 kg of CO2 per kg of plastic, or about 3,500 kg per cubic meter (assuming a density of about 1,000 kg per cubic meter). So per unit volume, plastic has somewhere around 10 times the embodied emissions of concrete.
We can also do a more direct comparison. Consider a beam spanning around 20 feet and supporting a vertical load of 21,000 pounds per linear foot. The lightest U.S. standard steel section that will span this distance is a W16x26, which weighs about 236 kg and will have embodied carbon emissions of around 354 kg.
A concrete beam of the same depth, supporting the same load and spanning the same distance, will be 10.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep, with three #10 steel bars running along the bottom. This beam will have about 190 kg of embodied emissions from the concrete, and about another 230 kg of embodied emissions from the steel rebar. This is about 20% more than the steel beam, but in the same ballpark — and over half the “concrete” emissions are actually due to the embedded reinforcing steel.
This is arguably a nonrepresentative example (most concrete, such as in columns or slabs, will have a much lower ratio of steel), but the basic logic holds: Concrete is unusual in its total volume of use, not how emissions-heavy it is as a material. Most material substitutes that aren’t wood, recycled materials, or industrial byproducts that can be had for “free” won’t necessarily be much better when used at the same scale. In some ways, it’s surprising that the carbon emissions from concrete are as low as they are.
Of course, this calculus is likely to change over time — as electricity sources change over to lower carbon ones, you’re likely to see the embodied emissions of materials drop along with it. And since cement releases CO2 as part of the chemical process of producing it, concrete will look increasingly worse compared to other materials over time.
One potential option is to find ways of changing the cement production process to be less carbon-intensive. The easiest option is to just replace manufactured Portland Cement with some other cementitious material. Industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slag, silica fume, and fly ash, often have cementitious properties and don’t have a “carbon penalty” (since they’d be produced regardless.) Materials like these can potentially eliminate large volumes of cement in a concrete mix, and they’re a key part of current low-carbon concrete strategies — even “normal” concrete mixes tend to utilize these to some degree. But the total volume of these materials is limited by the extent of various industrial processes. And for things like fly ash (which is a byproduct from coal plants) and slag (which is a byproduct from CO2-emitting blast furnaces), we can expect production to decline over time.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that concrete will naturally absorb CO2 over time, a process known as carbonation. Even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life. Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt, and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO₂ during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete carbon emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Construction Physics, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
[0] - This figure varies depending on the source. Chatham House provides a frequently cited estimate of 8%. We can also ballpark it — roughly 0.93 pounds of CO₂ gets emitted for each pound of cement produced, around 4.25 billion tons of cement are produced annually, which gets ~3.95 billion tons of CO₂, and total annual CO₂ emissions are in the neighborhood of 46 billion tons, getting us a bit less than 9%.
[1] - Per Circular Ecology, ~70-90% of emissions are from the cement production process, depending on the type of concrete and what the rest of the supply chain looks like.
[2] - This seems to vary depending on where the cement is being made — in Myanmar, for instance, it’s around 46%.
[3] - Another number where the sources often don’t agree with each other, see here, here, and here for estimates on annual cement production.
[4] - Concrete is roughly 10-15% cement by weight, depending on the strength of the mix, what other cementitious materials are being used, etc. An average value of 12.5% yields 34 billion tons, which we’ll knock down to account for other uses of cement (masonry mortar, grout, gypsum overlay, etc.) This roughly tracks with estimates from PCA (“4 tons of concrete produced each year for every person on Earth”), and from the now-defunct Cement Sustainability Initiative, which estimated 25 billion tons of concrete against 3.125 billion tons of cement in 2015.
[5] - See here, here, and here for an estimate of total civilization mass flow. This doesn’t (I believe) include waste byproducts, which can be substantial — for instance, it doesn’t include the ~46 billion tons of CO₂ emitted each year, or the 16 billion tons of mine tailings, or the 140 billion tons of agriculture byproducts (though this last number is difficult to verify and seems high).
[6] - We see something similar with cement as we do with other bulky, low-value materials, in that it's made in lots of distributed manufacturing facilities relatively close to where it’s used. See here for a map of cement plants in the U.S. around 2001, for instance.
[7] - For China’s total floor space, see here (most sources seem to agree with these numbers). For U.S. floor space, see my Every Building In America article. For per-capita living space in Europe, see here.
[8] - The often high rates of cement use by middle-income countries have led some folks to develop a U-shaped cement consumption theory of industrial development — that countries start out using a small amount of cement, use more as they get richer and build up their physical infrastructure, and then eventually transition to using lower volumes of cement again. The Globbulk paper spends considerable time debunking this.
[9] - It’s not actually obvious to me what the substitution ratio would be. In strength-governed cases, you’d need proportionally more timber than concrete, but in other cases (such as replacing concrete walls with light-framed stud walls), you’d probably use less. Obviously, you can’t substitute all concrete for wood, but you can probably switch out more than you think — there’s no reason you couldn’t use wood foundations instead of concrete ones in many cases, for instance.
[10] - 30 billion tons of concrete is roughly 12.5 billion cubic meters, and total annual wood products produced is currently around 5.5 billion cubic meters.
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On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.
When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.
But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.
Now that the IRA’s tax credits face clear and present threats, this same story is playing out again. As the Senate makes its changes to the House’s proposed budget bill, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are keeping quiet, at least publicly, about their lobbying efforts. Most did not respond to my request for an interview or a statement clarifying their position, except to say they had “nothing to share on this topic,” as Microsoft did.
That’s not to say they have no opinion about the fate of clean energy tax credits. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have all voluntarily set ambitious net-zero emissions targets that they’re struggling to meet, largely due to booming data center electricity demand. They’re some of the biggest buyers of solar and wind energy, and are investing heavily in nuclear and geothermal. (On Wednesday morning, Pennsylvania’s Talen Energy announced an expanded power purchase agreement with Amazon, for nearly 2 gigawatts of power through 2042.) All of these energy sources are a whole lot more accessible with tax credits than without.
There’s little doubt the tech companies would prefer an abundant supply of cheap, clean energy. Exactly how much they’re willing to fight for it is the real question.
The answer may come down to priorities. “It’s hard to overstate how much this race for AI has just completely changed the business models and the way that these big tech companies are thinking about investment,” Jeff Navin, co-founder of the climate-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me. “While they’re obviously going to be impacted by the price of energy, I think they’re even more interested and concerned about how quickly they can get energy built so that they can build these data centers.”
The tech industry has shown much more reluctance to stand up to Trump, period, this time around. As the president has moved from a political outsider to the central figure in the Republican party, hyperscalers have increasingly curried his favor as they advocate against actions that could pose an existential risk to their business — think tighter regulations on the tech sector or AI, or tariffs on key supplies made in Asia.
As Navin put it to me, “When you have a president who has very strong opinions on wind turbines and randomly throws companies’ names in tweets in the middle of the night, do you really want to stick your neck out and take on something that the president views as unpopular if you’ve got other business in front of him that could be more impactful for your bottom line?”
It is undeniably true that the AI-driven data center boom is pushing these companies to look for new sources of clean power. Last week Meta signed a major nuclear deal with Constellation Energy. Microsoft is also partnering with Constellation to reopen Three Mile Island, while Google and Amazon have both announced investments in companies developing small modular reactors. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are also investing in next-generation geothermal energy startups.
But while the companies are eager to tout these partnerships, Navin suspects most of their energy lobbying is now being directed towards efforts such as permitting reform and building out transmission infrastructure. Publicly available lobbying records confirm that these are indeed focus areas, as they’re critical to bringing data centers online quickly, regardless of how they’re powered and whether that power is subsidized. “They’re not going to stop construction on an energy project that has access to electricity just because that electricity is marginally more expensive,” Navin told me. “There’s just too much at stake.”
Tech companies have lobbied on numerous budget, tax, sustainability, and clean energy issues thus far this year. Amazon’s lobbying report is the only one to specifically call out efforts on “renewable energy tax credits,” while Meta cites “renewable energy policy” and Microsoft name-drops the IRA. But there’s no hard and fast standard for how companies describe the issues they’re lobbying on or what they’re looking to achieve. And perhaps most importantly, the reports don’t disclose how much money they allot to each issue, which would illuminate their priorities.
Lobbying can also happen indirectly, via industry groups such as the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Data Center Coalition. Both have been vocal advocates for preserving the tax credits. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed a lobbying push by the latter — which counts Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google among its most prominent members — that involved meetings with about 30 Republican senators and a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
DCC didn’t respond to my request for an interview. But CEBA CEO Rich Powell told me, “If we take away these incentives right now, just as we’re getting the rust off the gears and getting back into growth mode for the electricity economy, we’re really concerned about price spikes.”
The leader of another industry group, Advanced Energy United, shared Powell’s concern that passing the bill would mean higher electricity prices. Taking away clean energy incentives would ”fundamentally undercut the financing structure for — let’s be frank — the vast majority of projects in the interconnection queue today,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director of AEU, told me.
Being part of an industry association is by no means a guarantee of political alignment on every issue. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are also members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — by far the largest lobbying group in the U.S. — which has a long history of opposing climate action and the IRA itself. Apple even left the Chamber in 2009 due to its climate policy stances.
But Powell and Godfrey implied that the tech giants' views are — or at least ought to be — in alignment with theirs. “Many of our members are lobbying independently. Many of them are lobbying alongside us. And then many of them are supporting CEBA to go and lobby on this,” Powell told me, though he wouldn’t reveal what actions any specific hyperscalers were taking.
Godfrey said that AEU’s positions are “certainly reflective of what large energy consumers, notably tech companies, have been working to pursue across a variety of technologies and with applicability to a couple of different types of credits.”
And yet hyperscalers may have already spent a good deal of their political capital fighting for a niche provision in the House’s version of the budget bill, which bans state-level AI regulation for a decade. That would make the AI boom infinitely easier for tech companies, who don’t want to deal with a patchwork of varying regulations, or really most regulations at all.
On top of everything else, big tech in particular is dealing with government-led anti-trust lawsuits, both at home and abroad. Google recently lost two major cases to the Department of Justice, related to its search and advertising business. A final decision is pending regarding the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Not to be outdone, Amazon will also be fighting an antitrust case brought by the FTC next year.
As these companies work to convince the public, politicians, and the courts that they’re not monopolistic rule-breakers, and that AI is a benevolent technology that the U.S. must develop before China, they certainly seem to be relinquishing the clean energy mantle they once sought to carry, at least rhetorically. We’ll know more once all these data centers come online. But if the present is any indication, speed, not green electrons, is the North Star.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Amazon’s power purchase agreement with Talen Energy.
The new funding comes as tax credits for geothermal hang in the balance.
The good news is pouring in for the next-generation geothermal developer Fervo Energy. On Tuesday the company reported that it was able to drill its deepest and hottest geothermal well to date in a mere 16 days. Now on Wednesday, the company is announcing an additional $206 million in financing for its Cape Station project in Utah.
With this latest tranche of funding, the firm’s 500-megawatt development in rural Beaver County is on track to deliver 24/7 clean power to the grid beginning in 2026, reaching full operation in 2028. The development is shaping up to be an all-too-rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.
The bulk of this latest financing comes from the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, which provided $100 million in project-level equity funding. The energy and commodity trading company Mercuria provided $60 million in corporate loans, increasing its existing fixed-term loan from $40 million to $100 million. An additional $45.6 million in short-term debt financing came from XRL-ALC, an affiliate of X-Caliber Rural Capital, which provides loans to infrastructure projects in rural areas. That comes on top of a previous $100 million loan from the firm.
The plan is for Cape Station to deliver 100 megawatts of grid power in 2026, with the additional 400 megawatts by 2028. The facility has the necessary permitting to expand production to two gigawatts — twice the size of a standard nuclear reactor. And on Monday, the company announced that an independent report from the consulting firm DeGolyer & MacNaughton confirms that the project could expand further still — eventually supporting over 5 gigawatts of clean power at depths of up to 13,000 feet. The company’s latest drilling results, which reached 15,765 feet at 520 degrees Fahrenheit, could push the project’s potential power output even higher.
Traditional geothermal wells normally max out at around 10,000 feet, and must be built in locations where a lucky confluence of geological features come together: high temperatures, porous rock, and naturally occurring water or steam. But because Fervo can drill thousands of feet deeper, it’s able to access hot rocks in locations that weren’t previously suitable for geothermal development, pumping high-pressure water down into the wells to fracture rocks and thus create its own geothermal reservoirs.
The primary customer for Fervo’s Cape Station project is Southern California Edison, which signed a 320-megawatt power purchase agreement with the company last year, advertised as the largest geothermal PPA ever. Shell was also announced as a customer this year. Fervo is already providing 3.5 megawatts of power to Google via a pilot project in Nevada, which it’s seeking to expand, entering into a 115 megawatt PPA with NV Energy and the tech giant to further build out production at this location.
Fervo’s latest funding comes on top of last February’s $244 million Series D round led by Devon Energy, as well as an additional $255 million in corporate equity and debt financing that it announced last December. On top of investments from well known climate tech venture firms such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Galvanize Climate Solutions, the company has secured institutional investment from Liberty Mutual as well as public pension funds such as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Fervo, like all clean energy startups, also stands to benefit greatly from the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, which are now in jeopardy as President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill works its way through the Senate. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has traditionally been a booster of geothermal energy and is advocating to keep tax incentives for the technology in place through 2031, the bill as it stands would essentially erase incentives for all geothermal projects that start construction more than 60 days after the bill’s passage.
Fervo broke ground on Cape Station in 2023, so that project will make the cut. For future Fervo developments, it’s much less clear. But for now, the company seems to be flush with cash and potential in a climate tech world awash in ill omens.