(Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Elegant Programs to scale back its oblique greenhouse fuel emissions by a first-of-a-kind deal to purchase low-carbon cement merchandise from the startup.
Beneath the contract, Microsoft should buy as much as 622,500 metric tons of Elegant’s cement over a interval of six to 9 years. Microsoft can declare the carbon reductions related to that cement in its personal emissions accounting, even when it doesn’t use the fabric itself. If Microsoft passes on shopping for the product, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based Elegant can promote it to native patrons however the software program big nonetheless will get to assert the carbon financial savings.
Elegant makes use of an electrochemical course of that eliminates limestone, which is cement’s foremost ingredient and releases carbon dioxide when it’s heated up and damaged down.
Microsoft’s push to construct extra information facilities supporting synthetic intelligence has pushed the corporate additional away from its aim of turning into carbon-negative by 2030. That AI growth has helped enhance the tech big’s emissions by 30% since 2020. Greater than 96% of the corporate’s emissions are Scope 3, or oblique, and supplies like cement utilized in information middle development make up an enormous share of them.
It’s Microsoft’s first time doing a deal like this for constructing supplies, although the corporate and others have used the identical strategy for sustainable aviation gasoline and renewable power. Referred to as an environmental attribute certificates, it permits the buying firm to make a sustainability declare primarily based on environmentally pleasant items – like clear jet gasoline, renewable electrical energy or low-carbon cement – that it didn’t use immediately. However these certificates usually promise greater than they ship, analysis exhibits.
“Our precedence, in the beginning, is at all times shopping for and putting in low-carbon supplies bodily which might be already in the marketplace as we speak,” mentioned Katie Ross, Microsoft’s director of carbon discount technique and market improvement. “However the problem is that they don’t exist on the scale or in all the places that we have to procure as we speak.”
The businesses declined to say how a lot the deal is value.
The challenges of inexperienced cement
It’s not only a Microsoft drawback. Though cement accounts for about 8% of worldwide emissions, it’s onerous to decarbonize partly as a result of development is a risk-averse trade with skinny margins and excessive security requirements, in response to Nik Sawe, a senior coverage analyst within the trade program at Power Innovation Coverage and Expertise LLC, an power and local weather assume tank. Meaning development firms have been reluctant to take up cement options developed by startups, that are cleaner but additionally presently dearer and untested in the actual world.
At its 250-ton-per-year pilot plant in Somerville, Elegant has lowered emissions by 90% in comparison with conventional cement, in response to Chief Government Officer and Co-Founder Leah Ellis. Elegant will begin delivering on its cope with Microsoft when its first 30,000-ton industrial plant is operational. It’s slated to be accomplished in 2027.
Cement is heavy, and transporting it over lengthy distances doesn’t make sense economically, Ellis mentioned. The deal permits Microsoft to assist the scale-up of Elegant’s expertise even when it doesn’t have a development undertaking close to the startup’s plant, she added.
Do environmental attribute certificates work?
Up to now, a few of these certificates have supported renewable initiatives that might have been developed anyway, that means they didn’t assist convey extra wind and photo voltaic on-line as promised, research present. Microsoft has mentioned it plans to section out its use of unbundled renewable power certificates in future years.
If offers just like the one the corporate signed with Elegant proliferate, the clear cement trade might want to show that the certificates it’s providing are verifiable and keep away from carbon emissions that producers would have generated in any other case, in response to a 2024 report on structuring demand for lower-carbon supplies co-published by RMI and Microsoft. That features making certain that the merchandise’ environmental advantages aren’t double-counted, or claimed by a number of entities as a discount on their emissions ledger.
“Checks should be in place alongside the best way to extend confidence that each buy of a certificates will ship its anticipated end result,” the report’s authors wrote.
For this cope with Microsoft, different prospects who purchase Elegant’s cement gained’t have the ability to lay declare to its environmental advantages, Ellis mentioned.
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