Low-carbon cement developers often find themselves in a loop: buyers want proven volumes, financiers want guaranteed cashflows and innovators cannot build plants without both. Only a handful of buyers – large technology firms (notably hyperscalers) and public procurement channels – are currently willing to anchor multi-year commitments that lenders recognize as bankable. We’ve signed multiple offtake LOIs and run testing, but demo production is a bottleneck – moving from costly demo to large-scale is the hard gap. Oscar Hållén, Cemvision Recent deals hint at the emerging playbook. Microsoft’s 2025 agreement with Sublime Systems secured up to 623,000 tonnes of ultra-low-carbon cement over nine years, designed explicitly to bridge the pre-FID gap. Similarly, the Sustainable Concrete Buyers Alliance aggregates buyers such as Amazon and Meta to create pooled, demand signals across multiple regions – a concrete parallel to green corridors in shipping.82,83 Digital offtake, such as book-and-claim models, are seen as an attractive option because they open up new customers and sources of revenue in a market where buyers of low-carbon materials are geographically dislocated from production sites. This provides liquidity to suppliers, which in turn helps to finance new projects. Customer acceptance Technical readiness means little without market acceptance. Cement products have changed little over time and therefore the introduction of new low- carbon cement products presents new challenges to buyers, who must ensure those new products have the correct performance characteristics before committing to large-volume purchases. Codes, engineering standards and public procurement guidelines lie at the heart of cement procurement decisions. Suppliers interviewed for this report repeatedly cited product standards and customer acceptance of novel cement products as critical friction points. The lack of a cohesive and uniformed set of standards is a significant deterrent for potential buyers of low-carbon cement products. However, there are several examples of new performance standards emerging which could help drive customers to low-carbon products – such as ASTM C1157 in the US, EN 197-5 and EN 206 in the EU and EPCC/BS 8500 in the UK. We’re at deployment stage… certification is the really big focus. We’ve got ASTM C1157 for our product in the US; the longer pathway is concrete acceptance (from buyers) – state DOT testing etc. None of that is super fast, but it’s happening. Susan McGarry, Ecocem Real progress will likely require buyers to be willing to seek out and try new low-carbon products and not just rely on traditional products and traditional procurement practices. In any given geography, we need a diverse array of buyers… cement is a commodity; acceptance across the value chain clicks when customers ask for it. Joe Hicken, Sublime Systems Turning Challenge into Opportunity: Supplier Voices from Heavy-Emitting Sectors 31

Turning Challenge into Opportunity 2025