Carbon Capture: The Multi-Billion-Dollar Fantasy That Will Triple Cement Costs

Pipe dream. (Adobe)

Every once in a while, the cement industry drops a headline so painfully obvious you wonder if anyone has been awake for the last decade.  

This week’s gem?  

Europe is sounding the alarm that cement prices could triple by 2050 if the current net-zero / decarbonization crusade stays on track. 

Triple. 

Not 10%… not 20%… three times. 

If you’ve been listening to the Concrete Logic Podcast for the last several years, this should land somewhere between “no kidding” and “we told you this was coming.” The writing’s been spray-painted on the wall in Type IL dust for years.  

The real question is: Did everyone really just figure this out now… or did they always know and were too scared to say it out loud?  

Or—and here’s my personal favorite—was this the plan the whole time? 

I’ll be honest: I didn’t even know the World Cement Association existed until I read their latest European Summit briefing. And apparently, they’ve just discovered that carbon capture is extremely expensive and will drive cement prices through the roof.  

Amazing revelation, gentlemen. 

If you want the real explanation of why carbon capture is a financial black hole, go listen to EP #061: Capturing the Concrete Boogeyman with John Kline. John’s my go-to for this stuff because he's actually spent time in a cement plant and not just in a policy meeting in Brussels. 

Here’s the carbon-capture plan in its simplest, Concrete Logic-approved form: 

1. Cement plant produces CO₂ (shocking).
2. You siphon it off before it hits the atmosphere.
3. You compress it. 
4. You pump it underground. 
5. You pray that nothing goes wrong. 
6. Taxpayers subsidize the whole thing. 

What could possibly go wrong?  

We’re basically taking a natural process that occurs over thousands of years and forcing it in reverse through a giant stainless-steel straw. Maybe if we shoot it into the aquifer, we can all have Pellegrino flowing out of our kitchen sink. That’s the only upside I see. 

BCG also weighed in and basically said the quiet part out loud: the cement market is going to splinter into two categories of countries — those perfectly positioned for carbon capture (U.S., Canada, and a few others) and everyone else who’s screwed.  

Why? Because you need two things to make this fantasy work: cheap energy, and somewhere nearby to bury the CO₂.  

If you’re missing either one, congratulations—you’re about to have the most expensive cement on the planet. And because the U.S. government never met a “green project” it didn’t want to massively subsidize, you better believe they’ll be pushing carbon-capture pipelines harder than a new interstate. 

Here’s the part nobody wants to talk about: How do we know the CO₂ is actually captured? How do we know it stays where we put it? How much CO₂ do we create running the equipment to capture the CO₂?  

You can talk yourself in circles trying to figure out the logic. Which usually means… there is no logic. This feels like yet another big-ticket “planet-saving” project where the general public pays for a destination no one can explain. 

We’ve been warning about this for years. Now the Europeans have finally blinked. The industry has been so terrified to question the decarbonization narrative that we’ve all just politely nodded while costs quietly head for the moon. Now Europe is admitting that by 2050 the only thing heavier than cement will be its price tag. 

Welcome to the party, WCA. Glad you finally said the thing everyone already knew.