An Indiana community bet on carbon capture. Trump is blocking it.

Federal and state officials announced last year that the Mitchell plant would receive $500 million to build a carbon capture and sequestration system.

The Trump administration’s zeal to eviscerate incentives to reduce global warming has swept up a community in deep red Indiana, where supporters of the president say his targeting of a local cement factory is hurting the region and an entire industry.

The Heidelberg plant in the town of Mitchell—about 90 miles south of Indianapolis—was meant to be a model for the world, a place where the United States could take the lead in cutting carbon dioxide emissions from cement manufacturing—an increasingly urgent goal for construction projects. Yet the administration’s cancellation of the $500 million grant for machinery to trap and bury the plant’s greenhouse gas left the staunchly Republican community stunned and cement industry officials questioning if the U.S. will be equipped to keep up with a fast-evolving global marketplace.

“This was going to be a demonstration project for the entire country,” said Don Caudell, the Republican mayor of Mitchell, with a population of 4,000. “Part of what is disheartening for us is so much had already been done and spent on this project, and now it has all come to a halt.”

The demand for lower-carbon cement is surging, as regulators in the states and other countries mandate cleaner products. Cement is one of the most carbon-intensive products, creating as much as 8 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas.

Countries are inking international agreements, vowing to purchase only low carbon cement in the future. States are directing their transportation departments—some of the largest consumers of concrete—to shift their purchasing to low-carbon products.

At the same time, the world’s biggest companies—especially tech firms pouring hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete to build sprawling data center campuses—see green cement as a crucial vehicle for meeting their own emissions targets. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are all pursuing partnerships aimed at securing more climate-friendly cement.

“Why would we not proceed with this to see how viable the technology is?” said Caudell. “It could virtually eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. It would be a win for everyone.”

Cement manufacturing also is one more sector where the United States has been in an innovation race with China, with both countries vying to invent the technologies that will be used by cement makers of the future. The abrupt cancellation of major projects in the U.S., industry experts say, plays into China’s hands.

“There is a growing international demand for this,” said Sean O’Neill, a vice president at the American Cement Association. The industry group says lower-carbon cement, accounting for just 2 percent of sales in 2020, now makes up two-thirds of the cement purchased in the U.S. Customers are demanding the industry get even more aggressive in cutting its emissions.

“The U.S. should lead in meeting that demand, rather than other countries likely to get funding and support from their governments,” O’Neill said. “The technology that could come from these projects is something that we can replicate and leverage. It creates a body of knowledge that ultimately helps the broader industry.”

The Department of Energy abruptly canceled the Heidelberg project in May as part of an administration purge of billions of dollars of grants perceived to be linked to global warming, which Energy Secretary Chris Wright has declared an exaggerated problem.

“Carbon capture and cement decarbonization as described in this award does not meet the goals or priorities of DOE and the Administration,” said the termination letter sent to Heidelberg. It also alluded to the cost of transporting the captured carbon being too high, which puzzled Heidelberg because the emissions would be buried on-site.

“It did not appear they had a very deep understanding of the project,” said David Perkins, a vice president at Heidelberg North America, a subsidiary of the multinational firm headquartered in Germany. A similar letter went to a company called National Cement, which lost a $500 million grant to pursue a promising form of low-emissions cement at its plant in Kern County, California, also a GOP stronghold. That firm is also appealing. National Cement is experimenting with a technique that would expand production at its plant while at the same time lowering emissions by mixing clay into the cement.

National officials say it is not just a technology that the U.S. could export globally, but one that could cut down reliance on foreign concrete by boosting the amount of cement that can be produced at existing plants in the country. They argue the project is strongly aligned with Trump’s priorities.

The Energy Department said in a statement that its initial review did not find the projects “are financially sound, economically viable and generate the largest possible benefit to the American people.” The department did not comment on the details of the appeals.

Critics say the cases underscore how Trump’s crusade against clean technology incentives is creating economic risks.

“We’re in a bilateral race with the Chinese,” said Andres Clarens, a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia who helped lead industrial decarbonization efforts in the Biden White House. “The rate at which they are developing products for the future of foundational materials is breathtaking. At the same time, big rule changes are coming to Europe, where you soon won’t be able to sell dirty cement.”

“There is an enormous export and growth market for these products,” he said. “We are basically saying to China: You can have this.”

Buyers and regulators see an opportunity in the industry to quickly make climate gains by demanding manufacturers scale up nascent technologies that promise to drastically reduce that carbon footprint. Most of the emissions come from clinker, a key ingredient made by cooking down limestone, which is packed with planet-warming carbon dioxide.

The National Cement project defunded by the administration would create climate-friendly clinker by swapping much of the limestone in it for clay, which releases far less greenhouse gas when cooked. The method could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent, according to the World Economic Forum.

It would also enable the National Cement plant to increase its production by as much as 40 percent, company officials say. That boost, if replicated across the industry, would enable U.S. producers to meet the needs of all domestic buyers, who currently rely on imports for 20 percent of their purchases, said Jon Dearing, a vice president at National Cement.

“If every cement plant did clinker substitution at the degree we can, we could end our reliance on imported cement,” he said.

The Heidelberg project is more focused on capturing emissions. One of the biggest challenges of carbon-capture technology is the immense cost of building pipelines to ship the compressed carbon to remote storage wells. That is not an issue in Mitchell. The plant sits on land ideal for storing the carbon, enabling Heidelberg to just pipe it straight underground.

The project was enthusiastically supported by GOP leaders in the state, who joined Biden administration officials at its unveiling. Now, the 1,000 temporary construction jobs and three dozen long-term positions at the plant it promised are in jeopardy. And Heidelberg could be forced to shift the demonstration project to one of its plants abroad.

“People feel like they have been stabbed in the back,” said Doug Duncan, a fourth-generation worker at the century-old plant and president of the local United Steelworkers union in Mitchell. “This was an investment in the long-term future of this plant and the cement industry. It would have allowed us to capture 2 million tons of carbon. Now, that future is uncertain.”