Sustainable cement firm Sublime Cement has been forced to reduce its workforce by 10 percent and pause development of its planned demonstration project in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

The decision was made due to the cancellation of a federal Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) award, which was set to fund 50 percent of its Holyoke plant.

This, according to a statement from Sublime, “created challenges in assembling our capital stack and forced us to consider alternative approaches to our demonstration project. We are actively working through a robust set of alternative scale-up plans and have several exciting options to bring our first commercial plant online.”

Sublime gained the backing of Microsoft earlier this year, which committed to purchasing 623,000 tons of its low-carbon cement product to reduce its construction carbon footprint. The cement was expected to be delivered by the Holyoke plant. DCD has reached out to Sublime for further information.

Sublime had received a $87 million grant from the Department of Energy to develop the plant, with it slated to produce more than 30,000 tons per annum. Sublime has said that it remains in ongoing dialogues with the DOE, aiming “to demonstrate how scaling our efficient, next-generation cement technology will onshore manufacturing of a critical building material, reducing our reliance on imports and increasing quality jobs for Americans.”

The company is pioneering an electrochemical process that entirely bypasses the need for a kiln, powered by coal or fossil fuels, to produce cement. Instead of using limestone, which is around 50 percent carbon, it dissolves calcium-bearing rocks or byproducts, significantly reducing the carbon footprint of the process.

The final product reportedly matches the strength, setting time, and handling of standard cement, offering a “drop-in” substitute while drastically reducing embodied CO2 and energy use compared with traditional cement production.

Cement is historically one of the biggest polluting industries, representing around seven to eight percent of global emissions. The data center sector uses large amounts of cement - almost 250,000 tons this year alone - which represents a huge amount of its Scope 3 emissions.

Several of the biggest firms have partnered with sustainable cement companies to support the growth of the sector. In August, data center developer Stack completed a test pour of Sublimes cement product at its campus in Prince William County, Virginia, marking its first use in the data center market.

Last year, Meta partnered with CarbonBuilt to scale its low-carbon cement product. Following this, the company signed a deal with Amrize to develop an AI model to create new optimal low-carbon concrete mixes.

Amazon has also gotten in on the act. In August, it announced a deal with Brimstone to reserve volumes of its cement from Brimstone’s production plant in Oakland, California.