| Building up I started my day in a tree-shaded courtyard at Sublime's offices, chatting with Ellis, who is the CEO. She walked me through the progression of the startup's cement technology, starting in the lab at MIT where she did her postdoctoral fellowship. Things started out small: the first time she and a labmate made cement, it was about the same volume as a single die. Years later, that small scale is almost inconceivable when you look around the company's pilot facility. The ceilings feel dozens of feet high, and I wouldn't be able to get my arms around the tanks that line the room. This facility started up in November 2022, recalls Mike Corbett, Sublime's head of engineering. The team moved quickly to build it, going from design to execution in about nine months. The company is doing something entirely new by bringing electrochemistry to cement production. But they've been able to leverage technology from other industries, like mining and chemical production, to find equipment that will work for what they're trying to do. "You can usually beg and borrow from other industries to solve similar technical problems," Corbett says. The result is part brewery, part mining operation, part cement production. The pilot line is a huge upgrade from the early days, but as Ellis put it, in the grand scheme of the industry, it's still "a cement plant for ants." A concrete truck can hold about 20 tons of concrete mix, which includes about two tons of cement. At a rate of 100 tons per year, it would take Sublime's facility roughly a week to make enough cement for just one truck. The next step for the startup is to build a demonstration facility producing around 100 tons per day. "That's the size where you're no longer invisible to the cement world," Ellis says. The current goal is to have that facility running in 2025. After that, there's yet another step: commercial scale, at about a million tons a year. The world has a huge appetite for cement, and Sublime is working to scale its production to meet it. While the material is basically invisible to us today, its climate impact is huge, and only likely to grow. "Everybody uses and owns cement, but they don't see it," Ellis says. So keep your eyes peeled, both for the cement around you and for more on this topic from me. | 
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