Lithuania’s sole cement producer, Akmenės cementas, is preparing for a generational transformation of its operations, with more than €700 million (~$826 million) in planned capital spending, most of which was earmarked for decarbonization.
The company is positioning the program as essential for remaining viable under tightening EU climate rules, rather than as a growth strategy. Output is expected to remain broadly flat, while carbon intensity becomes the primary performance metric.
Management has signaled that roughly €600 million (~$708 million) of the investment envelope would be directed toward carbon capture and storage infrastructure, potentially making the Akmenės cementas facility the first in the Baltic region to deploy CCS at industrial scale.
The aim is to put the plant on a pathway to climate-neutral production after 2035. With most of its cement sold domestically, the company sees compliance with the European Union’s climate framework as a prerequisite for preserving market access and long-term competitiveness.
Why cement needs carbon capture
Cement is structurally difficult to decarbonise. Only a minority of emissions come from burning fuels; the majority are process emissions released when limestone is calcined to make clinker, the core binding material in cement.
Efficiency upgrades and fuel switching can trim part of the footprint, but they cannot eliminate these inherent emissions. For producers facing rising carbon costs, CCS becomes less an optional add-on and more a condition for continued operation.
Akmenės cementas has already begun that transition. In 2024, the plant commissioned infrastructure to receive and dose alternative fuels, allowing the partial replacement of fossil fuels with refuse-derived alternatives and cutting combustion-related emissions.
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Earlier upgrades to dry-process clinker production improved energy efficiency and reliability. Even with these steps, the company’s annual CO2 output remains close to one million tonnes, leaving a large residual footprint that only capture technologies can address.
To bridge the full CCS value chain, the producer has joined forces with Schwenk Latvia, KN Energies and shipping partners in a regional CCS consortium. The plan is to capture and liquefy CO2 at cement plants, ship it via Klaipėda, and transport it for permanent offshore storage in the North Sea, building the Baltic’s first integrated CCS corridor.
The pathway is expensive and long-dated, but the strategic logic is blunt: without carbon capture, Europe’s cement kilns face shrinking operating space in a policy environment that increasingly prices emissions out of the market.
Read more: Stanlow Consortium Maps CO2 Shipping Route Into UK Offshore Storage
