CHICAGO, Aug. 25, 2026 — Cement is one of the most consumed materials globally, second only to water. However, the world’s enormous appetite for cement also has an environmental cost: Its production generates over a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide gas emissions annually, nearly 8% of total global emissions. Now, researchers at Stanford University are developing an electrically powered, plasma heating method to produce cement without burning fossil fuels.
Qi Zheng, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University working with Yi Cui and Paolo Monteiro, will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) during the “Energy Innovation and Carbon Management: Materials, Chemistry, and Novel Process: CO 2 Conversion and Storage” symposium in McCormick Place. ACS Fall 2026 is being held August 23-27.
Cement was invented in 1824 by a bricklayer looking for a fast-setting building material. In the two centuries since, the recipe for making cement has changed little. It involves heating limestone, clay, and other ingredients at temperatures as high as 2552 degrees Fahrenheit (1400 degrees Celsius). The heat fuses the raw materials into pebble-sized lumps called clinkers, which are then ground to produce fine, powdery cement.
A significant proportion of carbon dioxide emissions from cement production come from burning fossil fuels to heat the air inside the large kiln where the raw materials are turned into cement. “There are also lots of intermediate steps leading to a lot of waste heat,” says Zheng. To mitigate emissions, Zheng, along with Yi Cui, a Professor of Materials Science; Paolo Monteiro, a Professor of Civil Engineering; and colleagues, devised a way to use electricity instead of fossil fuels to directly heat the raw materials and eliminate these intermediate steps.
The new electrifying method replaces fossil fuel-powered-kilns with plasma heating, a process that involves directing electricity through ionized gas. This generates temperatures above 4352 F (2400 C), speeding up the formation of cement clinkers. Zheng and colleagues found that plasma heating fused raw materials into clinkers within seconds — nearly 100 times faster than traditional cement production.
In addition, by reducing the time required to heat raw materials, the new method lowered waste heat. Unlike traditional cement production that operates at 30–40% thermal efficiency, nearly 80% of the heat generated during plasma heating was channeled into producing cement.
The researchers found that the new, “low-carbon” cement, as they called it, had comparable mechanical properties such as durability and workability, to traditional cement. They also looked at the low-carbon cement under an electron microscope, and they observed that the new method introduced nanoscale defects that dissolved fast in water and boosted the setting of cement, thereby improving its strength as compared to traditional cement.
The plasma heating method also works with cement waste obtained from recycling facilities as the raw material. This promotes circularity and further reduces carbon dioxide emissions in cement production. Moreover, if powered by renewable energy, the entire plasma heating process could be emission-free.
In the future, the researchers plan to collaborate with cement industry stakeholders to test and scale their method for mass production.
Another priority, says Zheng, is to investigate the plasma method’s effectiveness at handling different kinds of cement waste as raw material. Cement waste can vary widely depending on the location and time of collection. It needs to be tested “whether the new technology is robust enough to deal with all kinds of waste, or if we need to screen a little bit before we feed the material into the machinery,” he adds.
The research was funded by the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, based in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Title
Making Zero-Carbon Cements in Seconds
Abstract
Rapid decarbonization of Portland cement production is essential to reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment. Yet meaningful emissions reductions will require a fundamental reinvention of cement manufacturing. Here, we present a plasma approach that produces sustainable cement in seconds, reducing processing time by two orders of magnitude. The method generates localized temperatures above 2400 °C, maximizing liquid-phase formation and dramatically accelerating clinkering kinetics. Beyond converting conventional raw meal into clinker, we show that concrete waste can be used as feedstock, enabling hydrated cement paste to be reclinkered to meet Portland clinker specifications while achieving compressive strength comparable to commercial cement. This work establishes a new pathway for zero-carbon cement production, expands the potential for cement waste recycling, and advances a more circular cement industry.