The startup cement Furno will get grants worth $20 million from the Department of Energy funds that will help the company build up to eight micro-kilns at a Chicago concrete plant.

For example, cement is not something that one might imagine to be in short supply in a city like Chicago. Yet because the nearest kiln is 100 miles away concrete companies have been paying through the nose for it, if only to be sure of meeting demand. Furno's micro-kilns promise to cut pollution and shut out transportation costs.

Furno's business partner in the project, Ozinga, purchases 60,000 tons of cement annually from suppliers to use at its Chinatown Yard, on Chicago's south side. It mixes the binder with aggregate there, producing concrete that has been used in many of the city's construction projects.

The vast majority of cement plants are huge operations, and it takes sprawling networks of logistics to move the material to where it needs to be. Not so with this Furno project: its output will only be that which Ozinga uses.

We've sized our facility, the project, to that, Furno founder and CEO Gurinder Nagra told TechCrunch. Nagra will be appearing onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco on October 28. They have access to the virgin limestone as well as the recycled material already.

To fuel the eight kilns that Mountain View-based Furno will install, Ozinga might rely on biogas, a form of methane generated from decomposing organic matter. That, combined with the use of recycled material, should sharply reduce the carbon footprint of cement produced at the facility.

Cement is also one of the world's most polluting industries, accounting for 8% of all carbon pollution. It is made by heating minerals containing calcium, such as limestone, to an extreme heat. This process, called calcination, produces cement plus enormous amounts of carbon dioxide in addition to those emitted by any fossil fuels used to produce the heat necessary for this calcination. For every metric ton of cement, 600 kilograms of carbon pollution result.

Most cement in current production is made in gigantic rotary kilns, essentially a long horizontal tube through which heat and raw materials circulate. These are inefficient because only about 30% of the heat used is for calcination, with the remainder constituting a complete waste.

Furno shrinks the kiln and stacks it upright, meaning that there will always be that much more of the heat participating in the calcination reaction. He has reduced fossil fuel pollution by at least 70 percent, and completely got rid of it when he fired it using hydrogen.

The startup raised a $6.5 million seed round in March, TechCrunch exclusively reported. The federal grant will pay for a huge chunk of the project. For the rest, and for other expenses, Furno will be raising a Series A round starting early 2025, said Kiersten Jakobsen, Furno's head of marketing.

With Ozinga, Furno, who's calling the deal Project Oz — a nod both to the project partner and to Nagra's home country — will create 50 construction jobs and 30 permanent jobs. The Department of Energy was particularly interested in that statistic, Jakobsen said. "There were some coal plant closures, and the DOE grant is to bring back jobs for those people who had been displaced," she said.

Furno wasn't the only cement start-up to win kudos from the Department of Energy. Terra CO2, of Golden, Colorado was awarded $52.6 million to construct a new plant outside Salt Lake City. The plant will manufacture a less-polluting cement alternative to the standard Portland cement in widespread use.