Constantz holds distinguished record as inventor of cement-making technologies

BY ROSE RAGSDALE FOR GREENING OF OIL

Calera, a carbon dioxide capture and storage technology startup firm in California’s Silicon Valley, is stirring debate in fossil fuel and construction industry circles around the globe.

But Calera’s founder, Brent Constantz, is an old hand at rousing excitement in the world of cement. A specialist in the development of novel, high-performance cements, Constantz is the inventor on more than 60 issued U.S. patents, as well as many pending related U.S. and foreign patent applications.

The University of California-educated scientist is the founder and CEO of three successful medical device companies: Norian, Skeletal Kinetics and Corazon. His bone-fracture cements can be found today in most orthopedic operating rooms in the Western World.

Constantz started his college career in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley majoring in architecture, mostly to play on the university’s NCAA championship water polo team. He transferred to UC Santa Barbara in 1978 to double major in aquatic biology and geological science, after seeing scanning electron micrographs of the elaborate mineralized structures of diatoms (siliceous marine plants,) which he saw as the most fantastic architecture.

The young researcher had been interested in co-opting coral growth mechanisms for creating large structures in tropical oceans out of “mother-of-pearl” or synthetic limestone. His vision was that these mechanisms would be lifted out of the sea in modules and assembled into massive structures in the built environment, like buildings and bridges.

“Eureka” moment came at parents’ home

The genesis of Calera began in 1984, when Constantz, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, won a coveted National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship grant, titled “The Skeletal Ultrastructure of Scleractinian Corals,” which allowed him to study coral growth mechanisms in the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific, as well as the deep sea and temperate latitudes.

Constantz told GreeningofOil.com that his road to discovery actually began when he visited his parents before leaving for his fellowship work and learned that osteoporosis had become a global epidemic.

“I was working about 400 miles northeast of Tahiti, but prior to going, I visited my parents. My father is a physician, and I picked up one of his medical journals and read an article on osteoporosis,” he said. “It said that it was the No. 1 medical expense in the U.S. and that really struck me. I was studying how fast coral grows and like a light bulb, it hit me that we could mimic the way coral grows in nature.”

With additional study, including a post-doctoral appointment at the U.S. Geologic Survey and a Fulbright Scholarship at the Weizmann Institute, Constantz was able to breathe life into his idea.

He developed synthetic coral as a fast-drying cement, raised venture capital and founded Norian, which is the market leader in the field.

It was Constantz’ insights about the physiochemically-dominated skeletogentic mechanism of reef coral that led to Norian SRS, a market-leading biomimetic, biomineral bone cement used today in most operating rooms that perform orthopedic surgery.

During the two decades (1987 – 2007) following his post-doctoral studies at the USGS and Fulbright at the Weizmann Institute, he focused his attention on medical applications of biomineralization. Constantz also joined the faculty at Stanford University and between 2002 and 2006, founded two more companies that manufacture medical products.

As a consulting professor at Stanford, he taught courses in biomineralization, carbonate sedimentology and bone mineralization, and has conducted numerous seminars and continuing medical education courses on the use of cement in bone fracture management.

Constantz also serves on the board of directors of the Stanford Environmental Molecular Science Institute and is affiliated with the Woods Institute for the Environment, where his expertise is in carbon dioxide sequestration in concrete and the built environment.

Khosla believed from Day 1

Having initially met Vinod Khosla in 1987, and having learned of Khosla’s interest in clean technology, Constantz contacted Khosla in 2007 with a new idea, a “green cement” to replace the carbon-intensive Portland cement, the third-largest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

“At that point, I already had 65 patents on cement so I kind of knew my way around cement,” Constantz said.

Khosla saw the value of Constantz’ idea immediately, and funded Calera after a couple of meetings, without even a business plan or slide presentation. Within a few months, Constantz had assembled a team that was making carbonate cements from seawater, hauled over from Santa Cruz to a facility in Los Gatos in a water trailer.

In October 2007, while Khosla was visiting the Los Gatos laboratory, the team noted that a lack of carbon dioxide in the seawater was limiting the reaction, and there was a need for more carbon dioxide. An experiment was in progress, bubbling carbon dioxide through the seawater, and it was noted that the yield increased eight-fold.

Constantz turned to Khosla and asked, “Where can we get large quantities of carbon dioxide?”

What’s in a name?

When he founded the company, Constantz named it Calera because he was studying the Calera limestone in the coastal ranges of California as one of his academic interests at Stanford.

The “Calera” is a 100-million-year-old pelagic limestone that rests on an exotic terrane, which originated from about 10 degrees latitude near the equator and was displaced northward along the western margin of North America. Several slivers today extend from New Almaden, south of San Jose, to Moss Beach, near San Francisco.

The Calera is unique in that it is not bedded like most deepwater limestones and does not contain many fossils, except for calcareous plankton from the open ocean. Instead, it appears to be the product of inorganic precipitation of calcium carbonate from hydrothermal vents expressing hot water from the Earth’s mantle into the deep sea. Supporting evidence for this interpretation is seen near Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino, where the Calera rests directly upon pillow basalts, which result from fresh basalt extruding as the mid-ocean rises, creating new oceanic crust.
Ridge Vineyards is known for its great zinfandels. In the 1970s – the early days of great California reds – Ridge winemaker Paul Draper interacted with Josh Jensen of Calera Winery, near Hollister, to set the stage for the great reds produced from this chalky, limestone “terroir,” or wine-making region. Calera is Spanish, meaning “lime-kiln,” and the Calera Wine Co. has an old Spanish cement kiln on the property, for which the wine company was named, though the winery itself actually rests on Paleozoic marble. 

Calera attracts more supporters

While Constantz declined to directly answer skeptics who posed technical questions in response to a GreeningofOil.com article published April 14, the company prominently posted more information about the Calera process on its website in a 17-page “sustainability review” written in March and a 36-page cost analysis for a carbon capture and storage project using the Calera process that is under way in the Latrobe Valley in southern Australia. The analysis, dated Feb. 28, was conducted by researchers at UC Santa Barbara.

More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy included Calera among six projects selected to receive a total of $106 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, matched with $156 million in private cost-share. The projects aim to find ways of converting captured CO2 emissions from industrial sources into useful products such as fuel, plastics, cement and fertilizers.

“These innovative projects convert carbon pollution from a climate threat to an economic resource,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in announcing the grants July 23.

Calera also picked up $15 million in a closed loan commitment Aug. 3 from Hercules Technology Growth Capital Inc., a leading specialty finance company providing venture debt and equity to venture capital and private equity-backed technology, clean technology and life science companies at all stages of development.

Hercules described Calera as a clean technology company that has developed an innovative process to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by coal or gas-fired power plants and convert it into calcium and magnesium carbonates for use in manufacturing carbon negative products such as sand, aggregate, supplementary cementitious materials and cement, as well as fresh water.