A Massachusetts company looking to build a new ultra-low-carbon cement manufacturing plant in the Pioneer Valley is up for a hefty federal tax credit.
It was January 2024, when Somerville-based Sublime Systems announced it would build its first kiloton-scale manufacturing plant in Holyoke.
The company bills itself as developing a “fossil-fuel-free, scalable, drop-in replacement for traditional cement in concrete,” using a process that ditches fossil fuel-powered kilns and old school limestone decomposing – greatly reducing emissions from what’s long been a pollution-heavy process.
It hopes to make thousands of tons of the stuff in the city’s Flats neighborhood, setting up shop where once several mills stood between the canal waters and the Connecticut River.
“When you do the arithmetic here, it's about $150 million for the city of Holyoke, and I believe, 70-90 jobs over its time, and then there are going to be the additional construction jobs that are going to come with it,” said Massachusetts Congressman Richard Neal of the 1st district, speaking at a press conference Friday, Jan. 17.
Gathered across the canal from the 16-acre site the plant will go up on, Neal, Mayor Joshua Garcia and Sublime Systems’s Pat Beaudry detailed the project and how the company’s in line to receive up to $46.7 million in tax credits.
The support came via the the IRS and Department of Energy’s “Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Tax Credit” or 48C Program, announced during the waning days of the Biden administration.
Beaudry told WAMC the company is thrilled with latest allocation, though it wasn’t a total shock, since the government had been focused on decarbonizing industries – the latest federal support comes a little less than a year after the U.S. Department of Energy announced Sublime Systems would get $87 million in federal funding through another program.
“Cement and steel, combined, are like 16 to 20 percent of global emissions … and so, I think that we continue to put our best foot forward when it comes to these federal opportunities, and we're incredibly grateful for the support, because building a first-of-a-kind facility is not cheap, but we do hard things in this country, and we get good results when we do so,” he said.
Beaudry says the company was founded in 2020 and has been working to make an impact on carbon emissions associated with cement production – a process that represents at least 8 percent of global emissions.
The company’s lab space on the other side of the state has a production capacity of 200 tons – but the planned facility in Holyoke could end up producing up to 30,000.
For Garcia, the mayor of a Gateway city filled with former mills and factories – a number of which have been redeveloped in recent years – seeing progress made in the area packs a combo of frustration and excitement.
The complications of environmental issues, costs and timelines, among other factors, can mean development headaches, but, he says, once a project crosses a certain threshold and heavy machinery’s clearing land parcels, the excitement seeps in.
“When you finally are able to find something that works, and the pieces align and the universe starts moving forward in one direction, and you get to this point, that's where the source of excitement and pride comes from,” he told WAMC.
A groundbreaking for the plant is in the near-future, Beaudry says, though most of 2025 will be devoted to preliminary design and getting plans in place for construction.
