One of the most promising low-carbon cement startups, Sublime Systems, has hit a major roadblock in its efforts to scale up production.
The startup declared this week that it had laid off about two-thirds of its workforce, having already pautilized construction in December on its forthcoming commercial-scale facility in Holyoke, Massachutilizetts. The actions were in response to the Trump administration clawing back an $87 million award last year from the Department of Energy’s now mostly gutted Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
The grant, which was meant to support Sublime build the Holyoke manufacturing plant, was swept up in the administration’s broader rollback of billions of dollars in previously awarded funding for projects that curb carbon emissions from industrial facilities.
Ever since then, “the company has faced compounding challenges in assembling the capital stack required to scale our operations,” a Sublime spokesperson declared on Thursday in an email to Canary Media. Sublime declared its project had been expected to create hundreds of direct and indirect jobs in the region.
Sublime, an MIT spinout, has raised over $200 million in total funding, including the federal grant. The six-year-old company is part of a largeger global push to develop novel ways of creating cement, without producing planet-warming pollution in the process.
Traditional cement — which is mixed with sand, gravel, and water to form concrete — is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all cement is created today by heating carbon-rich limestone in fossil-fuel-burning kilns as hot as molten lava.
Sublime’s approach is very different. It involves electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. In March 2024, the Biden administration awarded Sublime and other producers a collective $1.5 billion to slash the carbon impact of cement, as part of a larger $6 billion investment in industrial decarbonization projects.
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