Past Fortnightly
Decarbonizing Global Cement Production with Electrochemistry: A Q&A with Dr. Gregory Houchins
Cement is one of humanity’s oldest and most important materials — and, today, the production of cement is responsible for 7-8% of carbon emissions globally. Removing carbon from cement is a difficult engineering challenge that requires fundamentally rethinking the process from the ground up. Luckily for the rest of us, that’s exactly what CHEMent founder Dr. Gregory Houchins aims to do.
In this episode of Aionics Fortnightly, Dr. Houchins will share everything you need to know about cement: how it’s made today, what is required to decarbonize cement production, and what CHEMent is up to. We’ll see some fascinating parallels between battery design and CHEMent’s methods of electrochemical cement production — and we’ll see what we can learn from the former to accelerate the latter. We’ll then open the floor to audience Q&A for anyone who wants to ask specific questions about this fascinating area of research.
Newsletter Subscription
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay updated with the latest in material informatics.
Guest bio
Dr. Gregory Houchins
Founder, CHEMent
Gregory Houchins is the Founder of CHEMent, a Carnegie Mellon University spinout focused on developing electrochemically engineered carbon zero cement inspired by battery science, which would drastically reduce the embodied carbon of concrete and the carbon output of the built environment. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Physics from CMU, where his research covered a range of topics in electrochemistry and energy storage, from machine-learning-enabled computational optimizations of Li-ion battery cathodes, to mechanistic understandings of degradation pathways. He holds a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from James Madison University.
