Emissions Thresholds on Building Materials: France

Overview

Concrete, and the cement used to make it, is the most widely used material on the planet. It’s also one of its biggest emitters, responsible for around 8% of global emissions.

Producing cement requires exposing limestone to very high heat. This process, known as calcination, breaks the rock down into lime and carbon dioxide. The CO2 byproduct of the limestone breakdown accounts for more than 50% of the material’s total manufacturing emissions. Generating the necessary heat is another source of emissions, as it is typically achieved by burning coal or waste material. Petroleum coke and waste material can also be burned for heat, although these fuels are less common, as they are more expensive.

Producers are under pressure from government net-zero targets and their own customers to decarbonize. For the byproduct emissions, carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) systems offer the most likely path to decarbonization. For the fuel portion of emissions, companies can choose to extend their carbon capture systems, switch to another fuel such as hydrogen or biomass, redesign their kilns to run on electricity, or buy carbon removal credits and carry on with business as usual.

Whichever path is chosen, greening cement comes at a hefty cost for producers, and they are unlikely to make significant changes to their operations without sufficient incentives, binding regulations or a clear business case.

Impact

In France, 44% of energy consumption and a quarter of carbon emissions come from the building sector; concrete production accounts for the majority of both. The country’s RE2020 regulation, which came into effect in January 2022, is designed to tackle building-related emissions by introducing improved mandatory caps for energy demand and consumption. In particular, the regulation sets a threshold for the total embodied emissions of the construction materials used in new buildings, with the limits tightening every three years until 2031. The overarching goal is to reduce carbon emissions from operational energy and construction materials used in new public and private buildings by at least 30% by 2031, compared to 2013 levels.

For single-family homes, the material production and construction-related emissions threshold starts at 640 kilograms of CO₂ per square meter (kg-CO2/sq-m) in 2022 and drops to 415 kgCO2/sq-m by 2031. For new apartment buildings, the cap drops gradually from 740 to 490 kg-CO2/sq-m over the same time period. Currently, the regulation only concerns individual homes and apartment buildings. In its second iteration, it will expand to include offices and schools, and in its last phase, it will apply to hotels, shops, and gyms.

The current emissions footprint of a concrete-based apartment building in France sits around 745 kgCO2/sq-m, according to a cement industry union study, ever so slightly above the 740 kgCO2/sq-m limit in place since 2022. While the policy does not appear to be stringent enough to incentivize significant material changes today, building developers are thinking ahead for how they will meet the 2025, 2028 and eventual 2031 thresholds, which will require shifting away from status-quo operations. Since cement accounts for the largest portion of emissions in the lifecycle of a building, replacing or substituting this with lower-carbon materials becomes imperative to meet the impending thresholds.

Increased interest and awareness in this space is well-illustrated by emerging low-carbon materials products entering the market.  For example, Holcim, a cement producer based in Switzerland, provides low-carbon cement, named ECOPlanet, and low-carbon concrete, dubbed ECOPact. These products reduce emissions by at least 30%, compared with status-quo cement, by using recycled materials, increasing the efficiency of their operations, and investing in CCUS capabilities at their facilities. ECOPact sales have grown ten times, from 1% of total ready-mix concrete sales to 10%, and ECOPact sales have more than doubled their share of cement sales, from 5% to 13%, since 2021.

RE2020 aims to guarantee market demand for green-material producers, making the real estate sector carry the burden of the cost premium. This should encourage producers of construction materials to enter the market, which could help increase competition and reduce the green premium for materials buyers.

Opportunity

France is one of the few markets to implement a regulation to reduce the embodied emissions of new buildings in their production and construction phases, which generally account for over 60% of embodied emissions, according to a 2022 study on European buildings.  However, the use stage, which includes cleaning, replacements and maintenance, and the end-of-life stage, which refers to deconstruction, transport, waste processing and disposal, are not directly addressed by RE2020.

When designing thresholds such as the ones set in RE2020, it’s important for policymakers to consider the current emissions baseline and all stages where emissions can occur. If they are too weak, they will limit material substitution actions rather than incentivizing deep decarbonization; too strong, and the demand for large volumes of net-zero steel and cement could outstrip supply in the short-term, making the targets impossible to meet and causing private sector pushback.

Source

2023 NetZero Pathfinders Report Scaling Technologies for Greening Heavy Industry Röck M, Sørensen A, Tozan B, Steinmann J, Le Den X, Horup L H, Birgisdottir H, Towards EU embodied carbon benchmarks for buildings in Europe – Setting the baseline: A bottom-up approach, 2022 Agora Energy Transition report – REDUCING EMBODIED CARBON IN NEW BUILDINGS: RE 2020 IN FRANCE RE2020 Concevoir les logements avec des solutions en béton