Cement is a stubborn problem. For every ton of the gray powder that holds our world together, roughly another ton of CO₂ is released into the atmosphere, most of it from the fundamental chemistry of cooking limestone. You can swap in cleaner fuels, but that only addresses about 40% of the problem. The rest, the so-called process emissions, are locked into the recipe itself. This is the knot CURA Climate is trying to untie, not by reinventing concrete, but by re-engineering the first, most carbon-intensive step.
Founded in 2025, the Calgary-based startup is betting on an electrochemical process it calls pre-calcination. In simple terms, it uses electricity to split limestone into lime and a pure stream of CO₂ before the material ever reaches the traditional, fossil-fuel-fired kiln. The promise is a retrofit-ready system that could cut a cement plant’s total emissions by up to 85% while still producing standard ordinary Portland cement [CURA job posting]. For an industry responsible for 8% of global CO₂ output, that’s the kind of unit economics that gets attention.
The electrochemical wedge
The core of CURA’s bet is attacking the problem at its source. In a conventional cement plant, limestone (calcium carbonate) is fed into a giant rotating kiln and heated to about 1,450°C, typically with coal or natural gas. The heat drives off CO₂, leaving behind lime (calcium oxide), which is then combined with other materials to make clinker. This calcination reaction is unavoidable, and it accounts for roughly 60% of the sector’s emissions.
CURA’s technology inserts an electrochemical step upstream. By passing an electrical current through a slurry, it forces the limestone to separate at a lower temperature, capturing the CO₂ as a concentrated gas stream ready for storage or use, and producing lime to feed into the existing kiln [CURA job posting]. The key selling point is integration. The system is designed to slot into existing plant infrastructure, using the same feedstock and outputting the same intermediate product. It doesn’t ask a century-old industry to change its final product or rebuild its factories from the ground up.
A team built for deep tech
The company is a spinout from the research group of Curtis Berlinguette at the University of British Columbia, a serial climate tech entrepreneur whose work forms the technology’s foundation [HEC Paris, August 2026]. The founding team brings together a mix of scientific and operational horsepower tailored for the long haul of industrial decarbonization.
- Erin R. Bobicki, CEO. Bobicki leads the company with a focus on proving the technology can meet the scale and economic requirements of the cement sector [CURA, About].
- Phil De Luna, CTO. A materials scientist, De Luna is the technical architect focused on translating the core electrochemistry into a scalable process [Phil De Luna profile].
- Sabrina Scott, COO. Scott handles operations, bringing the project from the lab toward commercial reality [Caplight].
This academic-to-commercial pipeline is a common, and often necessary, path for deep tech ventures tackling foundational industrial processes. The team’s challenge is now one of engineering and deployment, not pure research.
The path from kilograms to kilotons
CURA’s roadmap is a classic scale-up curve for hard tech. The company has already commissioned a mini-pilot system capable of processing 5 kilograms of material per day, a crucial step for validating the chemistry and engineering at a small scale [CURA, Unknown Date]. The real test begins with the next phase: a 100-tonne-per-year pilot plant in Taber, Alberta, being developed in partnership with Grand Forks Concrete [The Taber Times, March 26, 2026].
This pilot is the bridge to a planned 30,000-tonne-per-year commercial demonstration facility, targeted for the late 2028 timeframe [Rodrigo Aragon Rodriguez - Progreso X | LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The recently closed $10 million seed round, led by Zacua Ventures with participation from Sandpiper Ventures, Amplify Capital, and others, is the fuel for this journey [CURA, September 17, 2026]. The capital is earmarked for advancing the Taber pilot, detailed engineering for the larger demonstration plant, and team growth.
| Milestone | Scale | Target Timeline | Partner/Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mini-Pilot System | 5 kg/day | Operational (Summer 2026) | Lab-based [CURA, Unknown Date] |
| Pilot Plant | 100 tonnes/year | Late 2028 - Early 2029 | Grand Forks Concrete, Taber, AB [SustainableBiz Canada, retrieved 2026] |
| Commercial Demo Plant | 30,000 tonnes/year | Late 2028 | To be determined [Rodrigo Aragon Rodriguez - Progreso X |
The incumbent to beat
The most credible risk for CURA isn’t a flashy new competitor; it’s the immense inertia of the global cement industry itself. Building and permitting industrial plants is a multi-year, capital-intensive endeavor with thin margins. The industry’s default move is incremental efficiency gains, not technological reinvention. For CURA to succeed, it must prove its retrofit is not just technically viable but economically compelling at a commercial scale, offering a clear cost per ton of CO₂ abated that beats alternative compliance strategies.
Its most direct competition will come from other decarbonization pathways vying for the same capital and plant space. This includes carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems bolted onto traditional kilns, alternative cement chemistries that use less or no limestone, and the use of supplementary cementitious materials. CURA’s answer is that its integrated approach captures the process emissions more efficiently and at a lower cost than post-combustion CCS, while avoiding the product qualification hurdles of entirely new cement formulas.
Doing a back-of-the-envelope check puts the scale in perspective. A single mid-sized cement plant produces about 1 million tonnes of clinker per year. At CURA’s claimed 85% reduction, retrofitting one such plant could avoid roughly 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually, just from the process emissions. That’s equivalent to taking over 100,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road for a year. The numbers are compelling, but they remain on paper until the 30,000-tonne demonstration plant proves they can be achieved outside a controlled environment.
For now, CURA’s task is to move steadily from kilograms to kilotons. If its electrochemical pre-calcination works as designed in Taber, it won’t just be building a pilot plant. It will be building a case that the cement industry’s hardest emissions are also the most solvable. The company to beat isn’t another startup, it’s the status quo kiln, and that’s a fight measured in decades and degrees Celsius.
Sources
- [CURA, Unknown Date] Decarbonized Cement Technology | https://www.curaclimate.com/
- [CURA job posting] CURA job posting | https://jobs.lever.co/cura/e7a6ea8b-7bc2-4aba-9df5-78970a2137e7
- [HEC Paris, August 2026] Climate Deep Tech: Solving Billion-Scale Problems Under Constraints | https://www.hec.edu/en/dare/innovation-entrepreneurship/climate-deep-tech-solving-billion-scale-problems-under-constraints
- [CURA, About] About CURA | https://www.curaclimate.com/about
- [Phil De Luna profile] Phil De Luna profile | https://www.linkedin.com/in/phildeluna
- [Caplight] Caplight profile for CURA Climate | https://www.caplight.com/company/curaclimate
- [The Taber Times, March 26, 2026] CURA and Grand Forks Concrete partner on pilot | https://www.tabertimes.com/
- [SustainableBiz Canada, retrieved 2026] Article on CURA's pilot timeline | https://www.sustainablebiz.ca/
- [Rodrigo Aragon Rodriguez - Progreso X | LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] LinkedIn post on CURA's roadmap | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigoaragonrodriguez
- [CURA, September 17, 2026] CURA raises $10 million USD | https://curaclimate.com/press/cura-raises-10-million-usd-to-advance-technology-to-electrify-and-decarbonize-cement-production