Ecocem is poised for an exciting future with its innovative ACT technology — a scalable, cost-effective, low-carbon cement solution said to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 70% compared with traditional cement — a key part of its global growth strategy. Aggregates Business spoke to the company’s founder and CEO, Donal O’Riain, to learn more about the Dublin, Ireland-headquartered business’s big plans.
Friday, 28 November 2025, was a good day for an hour-long conversation with Donal O’Riain, coming just over a week after the major European supplier of low-carbon cement technologies had staged its Materials Science Symposium in Paris, France (18-20 November).
At the symposium’s conclusion, Ecocem established a Materials Science Advisory Council to support the development and adoption of low-carbon cement solutions globally.
Comprising 11 of the world’s foremost materials scientists, drawn from top global institutions, the Council will build on Ecocem’s longstanding collaboration with the scientists whose research has already contributed to the company’s cutting-edge ACT technology.
Cement accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions, and the Council’s mandate is to deliver an annual statement of research and innovation priorities to decarbonise cement and concrete production globally, review and exchange insights from global research programmes, and identify new avenues for collaboration. The Council will also provide independent scientific perspectives on materials and processes to policymakers, standards bodies, and industry groups.
During the three-day symposium, leading academics and industry stakeholders shared insights and updates on next-generation low-carbon cement technologies. It heard from construction industry partners on the large-scale deployment of low-carbon cement and concrete on live sites. Discussions on the industrialisation of low-carbon cement technologies identified the urgent need for more meaningful collaboration between science, policy, industry, and investors to close the gap between technical feasibility and market adoption.
Speaking at the event, O’Riain said: “If we take the right action now, the cement industry can decarbonise globally by 2040 – ten years ahead of schedule, without excessive cost and without carbon capture. We can already deliver a 70% reduction in CO2 without additional cost. What the industry needs is urgent alignment between research, regulation, policy, and practice, to move from demonstration to full-scale, global adoption.
“Policy ambition drives progress and focuses resources and funding. Current policy supports only Carbon Capture, a single, expensive solution, rather than enabling a range of solutions which together can accelerate CO2 reduction. The Materials Science Advisory Council will work to build awareness and provide the independent scientific insight needed to maximise the industry’s potential to achieve decarbonisation of the sector ten years ahead of schedule.”
The establishment of the Materials Science Advisory Council marks the next step in Ecocem’s long-term commitment to innovation, scientific partnerships and delivering globally scalable solutions for cement decarbonisation. Over the past decade, Ecocem has invested more than €70 million in research and development, including its newly opened state-of-the-art Research and Innovation Centre in Chilly-Mazarin, a southern suburb of Paris, France.
Other recent milestones include a new €50 million ACT production plant in Dunkirk, northern France, a further €170 million investment to construct four new ACT production lines in France by 2030, achieving ASTM C1157 certification for ACT Technology in the US, affirming its performance, durability and reliability for use in the American market, and partnerships with leading construction firms such as Sisk, Cemex France, Bouygues Construction, Vinci Construction, CB Green, and the Greece-headquartered Titan Group.
O’Riain stresses that Ecocem is not a new player on the lower-carbon cement technology scene. For 25 years, the company has developed and supplied low-carbon cement solutions across Europe. It operates from two plants in France, as well as sites in the Netherlands and Ireland, producing two million tonnes of low-carbon cement each year, 90% of which is ground slag, a fine, grey powder made from water-quenched iron blast-furnace by-product, used as a sustainable substitute for Portland cement in concrete, mortar, and grout. The remaining 10% are conventional CEMIII-range cements.
Ecocem’s technology has supported major infrastructure projects, including Le Grand Paris Express, Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Village, and the UK’s HS2. To date, it has helped avoid 18 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions, equivalent to the annual absorption of over 800 million trees.
Investors include Saint-Gobain Group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and ArcelorMittal. In 2025, Ecocem, which has locations in Ireland, France, the UK, the Netherlands and the US, announced more than €220 million of investment in new production capacity and R&I (research and innovation) facilities to accelerate the commercialisation of ACT and support its ‘Beyond Clinker’ strategy.
O’Riain explains that by replacing up to 70% of clinker — the key polluting ingredient in cement — with low-carbon SCMs (Supplementary Cementitious Materials), ACT, the result of a decade of research, significantly lowers the carbon footprint of cement (approximately 200 kg eqCO2/t compared to 600 kg eqCO2/t), while achieving the required strength, durability, and workability in the concrete it is used to make.
As O’Riain notes, low-carbon cements have been used effectively for decades, but scaling them has been a challenge. This, he emphasises, makes ACT a ‘breakthrough’ technology precisely because it multiplies the low-carbon benefits of traditionally used low-carbon cements, as well as new ones, and allows them to scale as never before.
Unlike many low-carbon cements or CCS (carbon capture and storage) solutions still in early development stages, O’Riain says ACT is built for real-world deployment – fast, scalable, and designed to work within today’s infrastructure.
ACT is said to cut clinker use by up to 70%, replacing it with abundantly available, low-carbon materials such as limestone and SCMs. O’Riain says each deployed low-carbon material and SCM is optimised, with combined synergies maximised, allowing the resulting ACT-based product to be utilised far more efficiently. O’Riain stresses that ACT delivers cement with the required strength, workability, and durability without changing manufacturing or jobsite practices or incurring a green premium. He emphasises that ACT’s compatibility with global standards and infrastructure makes it viable across mature and emerging markets.
O’Riain says ACT will accelerate access to scalable low-carbon, low-clinker, competitive cement technology and, if rapidly adopted, can deliver a 50% reduction in CO2 by 2030.
“I remember 35 years ago when people in this industry were saying, ‘There’s no point playing around with this technology. We know how to make money from making cement. We’re more worried about pricing and about disruptors entering the market and taking market share. That’s what we need to concentrate on.’ Technical innovation departments didn’t exist in the cement industry.
“When you looked at the cost of CO2 [emissions], it didn’t figure at all. When cement companies looked at the marginal cost of production, they saw something like €20 to €25 per tonne, and that’s all they had to take into account. Now, CO2 alone can comfortably add €60-€80 to that. You’re talking, in today’s market, of €100 per tonne being your marginal cost of production. That changes everything in the business, a fundamental structural change. If a cement business tries to operate in the same way with the same technology it’s always used, it will cease to exist.”
O’Riain initially entered the building materials world in the 1990s at CRH, spending three years as the industry group giant’s strategic development director in Ireland, followed by three years working in Paris on European acquisitions.
“I didn’t instantly fall in love with the industry. My preferred aspect of it was cement making, as it has been more profitable than the rest of the industry. I thought that was the best place to be, but at that stage, no one was talking about CO2, so I left and set up a consultancy operation in France. Most of my clients had been from the building materials industry, so I started working with them on their problems from a cement user’s perspective rather than a producer’s. I could see that many would be interested in using alternatives to what they had.“
O’Riain says the 1997 adoption of the Kyoto Protocol to address climate change by setting the world’s first legally binding targets for industrialised countries to reduce greenhouse emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012 was a carbon emissions mindset game-changer for the global cement industry.
“The cement industry suddenly had a huge problem as a big emitter of CO2. It was saying, ‘What are we going to do?‘ I thought good quality alternatives, like slag, would have a tremendous market. It was a good time to get into the cement industry with a low-carbon product, and I thought, in the long term, that would be a valuable product to have. I wanted to be in control of the decisions around that, so I set up Ecocem and created a completely new team.”
Speaking about the business’s early days, O’Riain says: “It was set up in November 2000, and before that, it took about four or five years to get to that point, because we didn’t have the [financial] and industrial resources and a lot of skills that we needed to be a startup. We didn’t have permitting for sites or supply contracts, so I handled most of the work to secure them. We built up a financing package and crossed the Rubicon at that point, building two cement plants, one in the Netherlands and the other in Ireland. They are still operating successfully and have been joined by two other major plant developments in France, the first opened in 2010, the second in 2020. We are now a major supplier of low-carbon cement to the French construction market.
“Today, we are not just a manufacturer, we are a low-carbon technology leader in the cement industry. We have the responsibility and capability to offer rapid, competitive decarbonisation solutions.“
O’Riain emphasises that for the last quarter of a century, the global cement industry has relied on one technology that converts blast furnace slag into a fine ground powder and supplies it as an alternative to cement.
“It’s a very solid business model as the quality of cement outperforms in terms of strength and durability any other types of cementitious materials. In a world without CO2, it would be a very nice technology to stick with. However, we could see 10 to 15 years ago that the lessons we could apply, others could too, so it was a much more competitive environment when it came to getting access to raw material to enable that business model. We knew we had to add some strings to our bow. We started to work on developing new technologies, at first to optimise what we could do with blast furnace slag, then to apply those lessons much more widely to low-carbon, supplementary cementitious materials.“
O’Riain says the level of resources Ecocem has invested in developing its new technologies over the past decade has led to the company obtaining “well into double figures“ of patents in the field of low-carbon SCMs. “We still have several patents pending in that area,“ he adds.
“When we went into that area [low-carbon SCMs], we found that no one else was working seriously in it, so we necessarily did new things; there was nobody to copy! There was plenty of opportunity to obtain patents, but we wanted to be selective, as securing patents is expensive. All our key technology developments have been patented.
“We now have [ACT] technology that can deliver an up to 70% reduction in the carbon footprint of cement, 90% of which is clinker, at relatively modest cost. It’s a much more competitive solution than anything else out there. The only alternative solution is carbon capture and storage, which is not a viable option for the global cement industry because it is too expensive. It’s too dependent on available storage capacity and very generous governments that are going to build infrastructure to transport the CO2 over huge distances to storage locations.”
Securing the wider use of ACT technology in the global cement industry over the next five years will, says O’Riain, “buy ten years“ for Ecocem and others to find a rapidly deployable and cost-effective way to cut the final 30% of cement C02 emissions without using unaffordable carbon capture and storage.
“We know how to cut two-thirds of emissions, and now we go for the remaining third. We need to change the policies and global consensus around carbon capture and storage. All the conversation is around it, but it’s a waste of time and money to talk about it and invest in it. You cannot lock everyone in that box and throw away the key. We need a much broader range of technological solutions. My own feeling is that we’re at a tipping point as an industry, with carbon capture and storage dying a natural death in two to three years.
“No one likes to be dragged out of their comfort zone, and, in the cement industry’s case, that’s producing Portland clinker [cement]. The industry needs to learn new tricks and skills, understand them at a high level, and apply them efficiently at scale. That scale-up effort will be a challenge, and government policy can legitimately support it. It’s not about securing large capital grants; it’s about encouraging the adoption of new technologies and further innovation. Then the industry will be able to deploy cost-effective new technologies rapidly.
“For market access, we have to change industry standards, including the European harmonised cement standard, EN 197. If that doesn’t recognise your product, it is very difficult to get it into the market. We now have a decision from the European Commission to revise EN 197, with the new norm being introduced by the middle of 2027, giving all our [low-carbon cement] technologies access to the market. That was a long, hard battle which we’ve won. In parallel, we are not waiting until 2027, as we are building our industrial capacity to produce ACT at scale in Dunkirk, which will be operational by the end of 2026. While we won’t have the European [harmonised cement standard] norm at that stage, we have already achieved technical certification in France [to produce and sell ACT cement nationally].“
O’Riain says that, as well as selling ACT cement in France from late 2026, Ecocem will also look to sell in the Benelux [Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg] market. “The combined France and Benelux markets, accessible from Dunkirk, are about 15 million tonnes of cement. The largest concentration of cement demand in Europe, running from southeast England to the north of France and the Benelux countries, is over 20 million tonnes. We will supply the UK [with ACT] market initially with relatively small volumes, as we aren’t yet set up to be as efficient in supplying there.“
O’Riain says it is important for Ecocem to handle the “burden of being leaders“ in low-carbon cement technologies and to demonstrate how effective they can be for existing and new customers. “In parallel, we are very comfortable with licensing our ACT technology to anyone seriously interested in using it. What we are saying to the cement industry is, ‘You can try and invent this technology yourself, allowing ten years for that, and make sure you avoid the patents we already have in place.‘ Alternatively, sit down and talk with us, and we’d be very happy to license our technology to you. We are having meaningful discussions with a double-digit number of cement companies on that.”
In April 2025, Titan Group, a leading international business in the building and infrastructure materials industry, became the first cement major to license Ecocem’s ACT technology. The licensing agreement will see Titan and Ecocem co-develop and deliver a bespoke, general-purpose cement version of ACT, initially for Titan’s Greek domestic market.
Speaking after the licensing deal was struck, O’Riain said: “Signing this co-development and technology transfer agreement with a partner of Titan Group’s size and calibre is a real demonstration of confidence in our ACT technology. It is also a testament to the value of our focus on research and innovation and our ability to take pioneering new approaches for low-carbon cement from the lab to the construction site.”
At the end of our conversation with O’Riain, and given the recent establishment by Ecocem of the new Global Materials Science Advisory Council, Aggregates Business is in no doubt that ACT will be one of several new ‘lab to the construction site‘ low-carbon cements coming onto the European and wider world marketplace in the next few years.
