Visitors Get Up-Close Look at Low-Carbon Concrete Demonstration

On behalf of our client Open Compute Project (OCP), WJE is testing four low-embodied carbon concrete mixes through a field trial for use in slabs of data centers owned by Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. On August 8, 2024, we hosted representatives from those organizations as well as others at our Northbrook headquarters to discuss the challenges and benefits of low-embodied carbon concrete.

“The promise to make this happen is really WJE,” said George Tchaparian, chief executive officer of OCP. “We hope to move the blueprint forward and then deploy it.” 

Since 2023, OCP has been facilitating a collaborative effort among these four leading technology innovators to drive adoption of low-embodied carbon concrete in data center construction. Together, the group is targeting a greater-than-50-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. OCP's project with WJE will offer recommendations based on the laboratory and field evaluations conducted, and will help OCP advance toward its sustainable and scalable low-carbon concrete construction objectives for data center buildings. 

“We sincerely appreciate being involved in this project,” noted President and CEO Bill Nugent in his opening remarks to guests, including representatives from the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Illinois and Michigan Departments of Transportation, and others.

Concrete is estimated to account for about 1 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases emissions and about 90 percent of those emissions come from manufacturing portland cement—a process that involves burning rocks (primarily limestone) with fossil fuels.

Principal Todd Nelson explained our rigorous testing program to the visitors, where four concrete mixes were developed in our Janney Technical Center.

Each of the four mixes was pumped into a laboratory space on our headquarters campus and then placed and finished. “We tried to simulate actual construction practice,” he said. 

All the mixes met the large-scale data center providers’ requirements for plastic properties, compressive strength, and drying shrinkage.

Still, challenges remain. While all the mixes were judged to be pumpable and placeable, workability and setting characteristics were challenging.

“Aesthetics are important. A lot of facilities want a beautiful slab,” Principal Tom Van Dam said. “We think we can get there.”

Watch this brief video to see how we walked attendees through the research and development of the concrete mixes and to learn how we are helping those clients and others navigate these industry changes.