A UK climate technology company, spun out of UCL and Cambridge research, that uses artificial intelligence to cut energy use and emissions at cement, glass and steel plants.
Carbon Re uses artificial intelligence to help heavy industry cut its carbon emissions. Cement, steel and glass together account for over a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the company starts with cement. Its software platform, called Delta Zero, uses a method called deep reinforcement learning, in which an AI learns by trying actions and seeing what works. It finds energy waste in a plant, and can take control to adjust settings, without the plant needing new equipment. The company reports the software has helped cement plants use lower-carbon fuels and cut emissions by about 5 per cent, which it says is around 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year at a typical plant.
The company was founded in 2021 by Dr Daniel Summerbell, Buffy Price, Sherif Elsayed-Ali and Dr Aidan O'Sullivan. It was the first university spin-out to be jointly backed by UCL and Cambridge Enterprise. Its stated mission is to reduce global emissions at the gigatonne scale, starting with cement, or in a 2024 article's words, "to drastically reduce industrial carbon emissions". A gigatonne is a billion tonnes. The company has also built a prototype for glass manufacturing, using data from Glass Futures, and says it is looking at steel.
On UK presence, the company comes from UCL in London and the University of Cambridge, and has been supported by Innovate UK. A London company listing appeared in search results, but the pages we read do not describe offices or a headquarters, so we cannot give a precise address. Its best-known customer is Heidelberg Materials. In 2024, Carbon Re's platform was used at Heidelberg's Mokra plant in Czechia, where a one-month-on, one-month-off test showed a 4.1 per cent cut in fuel costs, a 2.2 per cent drop in heat use, and a 33 per cent fall in variability of two product-quality measures.
As for people, Buffy Price is co-founder and chief operating officer, and Dr Summerbell is co-founder and chief science officer. The company is a member of the Industrial Decarbonisation AI Coalition. A later news item names Josh Vernon as chief executive. We found no first-hand description of the working culture or headcount, so we leave that open. What is clear from the mission is that the team mixes data scientists and machine learning engineers with people who understand how kilns and furnaces run.
If you are interested in climate and also like maths, computing or physics, this is a company where those meet. Cement is used to make concrete, one of the most widely used materials on Earth, and making it takes enormous heat, so small percentage savings across many plants add up to large amounts of carbon. Roles at a company like this include AI researchers, software engineers, process and plant engineers, customer teams who work with plant operators, and the people who run the business.
Website: www.carbonre.com
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