Heidelberg Materials has placed its GeZero carbon capture project in Geseke, Germany, on hold, stating that current market and regulatory frameworks fail to provide a viable commercial foundation for the facility.

Planned as Germany’s first inland cement manufacturing facility to deploy scalable industrial carbon capture technology, the GeZero development had previously secured €191 million ($214 million) in grant support from the EU Innovation Fund.

“As a listed company, we will only pursue CO2 capture if we have a stable, sound business case for it. We do not yet have that in Geseke,” said Dominik von Achten, CEO of Heidelberg Materials, describing the decision to pause project execution as necessary under current market conditions.

The decision highlights ongoing midstream and downstream bottlenecks facing inland European industrial emitters attempting to decarbonize energy-intensive production assets.

Heidelberg Materials specifically cited a lack of mature CO2 pipeline transport infrastructure, inadequate access to permanent geological storage sinks, and incomplete carbon value chains as the primary obstacles preventing the project from achieving economic viability.

The operational pause is restricted to the GeZero CCS deployment and will not affect ongoing daily cement manufacturing operations at the Geseke site. Heidelberg Materials stated it intends to use the hold period to further optimize the engineering design and overall framework of the project until supportive infrastructure and regulatory conditions are established.

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