Cemex has secured a €200 million state grant for its SOMZERO project at the Alcanar cement works in Catalonia, funding carbon capture designed to trap more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
Cemex has won a €200 million ($218 million) grant from Spain’s industrial decarbonisation programme to fund a carbon capture project at its Alcanar cement plant in Tarragona, Catalonia. The award anchors a project worth more than €450 million ($490 million) that would make Alcanar one of southern Europe’s first net-zero cement works.
The scheme, named SOMZERO, will deploy carbon capture, transport and permanent storage at the site, targeting more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. It addresses the process emissions released when limestone is heated to make clinker, the core ingredient in cement. Those emissions are chemically unavoidable and can’t be cut through energy efficiency or alternative fuels alone, which makes cement one of the hardest industrial sectors to decarbonise.
A regional carbon hub
Cemex plans to use Alcanar as the anchor for a wider CO2 hub in Catalonia. Shared transport and storage infrastructure would let other public and private emitters in the region route captured CO2 through the same network. The company frames the plant as a template for heavy industry, pairing one large capture site with infrastructure that others can plug into.
The €200 million comes from Line 1 of Spain’s Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE) for industrial decarbonisation. The Ministry of Industry and Tourism runs the programme through the state entity SEPIDES, drawing on the European Union’s NextGenerationEU recovery fund. The grant is part of a broader Spanish effort to modernise its cement industry, which has recently drawn public money for carbon capture and hydrogen upgrades.
Cement makers across the bloc face rising costs under the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which together push producers to cut process emissions rather than pay for them. State grants like the PERTE award help close the gap between those compliance costs and the price of building capture at scale.
Fernando Enríquez, vice president of operations at Cemex EMEA, said the project showed how sustainability, innovation and industrial competitiveness could work together. He added that decarbonising energy-intensive industry needs long-term vision, supportive regulation and close cooperation between the public and private sectors.
SOMZERO forms part of Cemex’s Future in Action strategy, which targets net-zero emissions across the company by 2050. The company cautioned that keeping the project on schedule will depend on continued institutional support, further financing and clear rules for carbon transport and geological storage in Spain.
For industrial emitters watching Europe’s cement sector, the award shows how public grants and shared CO2 networks can start to make heavy-industry carbon capture commercially viable. Much still rests on whether Spain sets the storage and transport rules the project needs to reach operation.
