Drax and Power Minerals partner on green cement material

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Drax and Power Minerals partner on green cement material

Drax has signed a 20-year joint venture agreement with Power Minerals Ltd (PML) to develop a factory for processing legacy ash into supplementary cementitious material (SCM), or fly ash, an ingredient in low-carbon green cement. The factory will be built next to the Drax power station in Selby, Yorkshire on land leased from Drax. Under […]

The factory will be built next to the Drax power station in Selby, Yorkshire on land leased from Drax. Under the agreement, PML will build, own and operate the new facility, while Drax will sell its legacy pulverised fuel ash (PFA) to the joint venture and provide power to the factory.

The factory is due to enter service by the end of 2026, with an initial production capacity of 400,000 tonnes per year. According to the announcement, the facility will ultimately process millions of tonnes of PFA.

The move marks the latest shift for Drax, following the power station’s gradual conversion to biomass since the mid-2010s. Drax says it is the single largest generator of renewable electricity in the UK. However, the power station has also been found to be the largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the UK by think-tank Ember Energy, based on an analysis of official data from the UK Emissions Trading Scheme registry and company annual reports. Drax Group has also been fined by UK regulators for misreporting data on the forestry type and sawlog content it uses for its biomass.

Nonetheless, Drax is continuing its push to bolster its green credentials. The company is also proposing to add carbon capture and storage (CCS) to the power station site. However, this bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) initiative still requires government funding, as well as a confirmed route to carbon storage, in order to go ahead.

The announcement on the fly ash partnership represents a further step in Drax’s green push. The company noted in the announcement that cement production accounts for around 8% of global CO2 emissions. It added that PML had estimated that use of PFA from Drax could reduce CO2 emissions by a minimum of 6m tonnes over the duration of their partnership, compared to using conventional cements.

“This is a landmark deal not only for Drax, but for the UK construction industry,” stated Drax’s chief operations officer, Lee Dawes. “Cement production is one of the most carbon-intensive processes in the world and through this partnership, we will be able to help the construction industry cut its carbon emissions in the years ahead,” he added.

“The opportunity to sell large volumes of PFA from Drax power station as part of a long-term JV is another way in which we can realise incremental value from the site whilst helping to reduce carbon emissions,” Dawes continued. “It is an exciting time for Drax as we continue to develop options for long-term investment in the site, including BECCS and a data centre.”

Meanwhile, Nils Jansen, the head of cementitious materials at PML’s parent company, EP Power Minerals, said the agreement positioned his company to become “the leading player in the UK fly ash market for the foreseeable future”.

Drax will share the profits of the joint venture’s sales of SCM. The company estimates that the project could generate incremental adjusted EBITDA of around £5m per year post-2027 until 2046.

Ash from the Drax power station has historically been deposited nearby, at Barlow Mound. Drax said the mound would be retained at its current height along the west and southwest of the site to continue to protect the views of local residents, while the remainder of the mound would be extracted down to surrounding ground levels and then restored.

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What does Arm need to do to gain enterprise acceptance?

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At the Crossroads of AI and the Edge: Inside 1623 Farnam’s Rising Role as a Midwest Interconnection Powerhouse

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When Schneider Electric emerged from its 2025 North American Innovation Summit in Las Vegas last week with nearly $2.3 billion in fresh U.S. data center commitments, it didn’t just notch a big sales win. It arguably put a stake in the ground about who controls the AI power-and-cooling stack over the rest of this decade. Within a single news cycle, Schneider announced: Together, the deals total about $2.27 billion in U.S. data center infrastructure, a number Schneider confirmed in background with multiple outlets and which Reuters highlighted as a bellwether for AI-driven demand. For the AI data center ecosystem, these contracts function like early-stage fuel supply deals for the power and cooling systems that underpin the “AI factory.” Supply Capacity Agreements: Locking in the AI Supply Chain Significantly, both deals are structured as supply capacity agreements, not traditional one-off equipment purchase orders. Under the SCA model, Schneider is committing dedicated manufacturing lines and inventory to these customers, guaranteeing output of power and cooling systems over a multi-year horizon. In return, Switch and Digital Realty are providing Schneider with forecastable volume and visibility at the scale of gigawatt-class campus build-outs. A Schneider spokesperson told Reuters that the two contracts are phased across 2025 and 2026, underscoring that this arrangement is about pipeline, as opposed to a one-time backlog spike. That structure does three important things for the market: Signals confidence that AI demand is durable.You don’t ring-fence billions of dollars of factory output for two customers unless you’re highly confident the AI load curve runs beyond the current GPU cycle. Pre-allocates power & cooling the way the industry pre-allocated GPUs.Hyperscalers and neoclouds have already spent two years locking up Nvidia and AMD capacity. These SCAs suggest power trains and thermal systems are joining chips on the list of constrained strategic resources.

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The Future of Hyperscale: Neoverse Joins NVLink Fusion as SC25 Accelerates Rack-Scale AI Architectures

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

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