Brimstone is building the Fourth Great Refinery
- Brimstone
- Jan 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 15
By Cody Finke, CEO of Brimstone
History has produced three “great refineries”—industrial breakthroughs that mastered co-production to massively improve efficiency, expand access to essential products, and tap into trillion-dollar markets. Each began as a single-product process and evolved into a system that turned one feedstock into many valuable outputs, radically improving productivity, eliminating waste, and optimizing economics. Brimstone is building the Fourth Great Refinery, using the same strategy that once created industrial giants to redefine efficiency, sustainability, and profitability across cement, steel, aluminum, and beyond.
The first great refinery was oil. In the mid-1800s, we began making kerosene from rock oil, wasting most of the oil in the barrel. Today, that barrel becomes everything from plastic to pharmaceuticals to fuel, with almost nothing wasted. That shift increased “crack spread,” or revenue per tonne of mined product, by about 9X, putting single-product producers out of business and transforming these early inventors into the world’s largest companies—first Standard Oil and later Exxon.
The second refinery was fertilizer. We first used nitrogen from the air—combining it with coal and water—to make ammonia via the single-product Haber-Bosch process. Soon, the newly invented Bosch-Meiser and Ostwald processes allowed us to convert ammonia into urea and nitric acid by capturing and reusing its waste CO₂ and oxygen from the original Haber-Bosch process. This increased the “processing spread,” or value per tonne of extracted feedstock, by 2.5X and ended the era of single-product fertilizer processes.
The third refinery was copper-containing sulfide complexes. It, too, began as a single-product process, making only copper, typically from cuprite ores. Today, we now typically mine sulfide ores and make dozens of products—from platinum group metals to nickel to sulfuric acid—increasing the revenue per tonne of raw material by up to 11X.
Brimstone is building the Fourth Great Refinery. Brimstone’s Rock Refinery ® will mine a silicate rock—the most abundant rock on Earth—to produce dozens of products, including cement, steel, aluminum, titanium, and magnesium. Our first plant, which will produce only cement and smelter grade alumina, will have a 7X increase in revenue per tonne of mined material. Across all our products, we expect to achieve a 40X increase in revenue. It will also massively improve sustainability by dramatically reducing both waste and emissions.
By applying the proven strategy of co-production to some of the most consumed materials on Earth, Brimstone is poised to disrupt centuries-old markets, revolutionize heavy industry, and unlock global material abundance.
Why co-production wins
Today, humans mine more than 100 industrial commodities. Nearly every single one is produced with at least one co-product. This wasn’t always true, nor is it a coincidence—it’s economics paired with physics. With co-production, a single process yields multiple outputs, sharing operational expenditures (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx) across co-products. The result is lower costs, higher efficiency, and greater resilience.
Cement, aluminum, and steel have, so far, largely defied this trend—until now. For the first time, the Brimstone Rock Refinery® will bring co-production to these markets.
Our first-generation process will manufacture ordinary portland cement (OPC), smelter grade alumina, and supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). In the years ahead, Brimstone will use our patented, highly efficient refining technology to manufacture steel, aluminum, and other light metals and critical minerals. As costs fall and new products emerge—as gasoline and plastics did in oil refining—the market itself will grow.
How co-production has evolved
Broadly, there are four types of co-production:
1: Monetizing the waste of single-product processes. Early oil refiners discarded gasoline. Copper smelters avoided sulfide ores because sulfur was hard to deal with. Over time, byproducts became valuable products—and sometimes grew into entirely new industries.
2: Switching from a single-product feedstock to a co-production-friendly feedstock. Materials that were once mined individually are now produced more cheaply and efficiently as co-products. Sulfuric acid, silver, and bismuth all followed this path as industry moved to larger, more efficient feedstocks.
3: Co-production takes only part of the market, because co-product demand does not scale evenly. Producing or selling the co-product is not always economic, often due to shipping costs. This limits co-production to a portion of the market, as seen in SCM for steel plants or gallium from aluminum.
4: Idiosyncratic factors lead a single-product process to persist. A small number of materials—notably, cement—have remained single-product due to geology, scale, and logistics. These represent the biggest opportunity.
The figure below classifies the ~100 major materials mined globally, indicating those produced through co-production and those still typically produced via single-product processes.
Figure 1: Major Mined Commodity Products
Economics of co-production
Every chemical process can be improved along two dimensions: energy efficiency and mass efficiency.
Co-production can reduce waste and increase mass efficiency by monetizing the “waste” as additional co-products or by enabling the use of a multi-product feedstock that leaves less waste. It also increases energy efficiency. Once a material has been partially processed, extracting additional products often requires less energy than starting from raw ore. Shared infrastructure further reduces CapEx. But not all co-production is successful. Geology, low concentrations, or complex separations can increase energy use or CapEx. Successful co-production depends on aligned feedstocks, processes, and markets.
We designed the Brimstone Rock Refinery® with these factors in mind. Our globally abundant, carbon-free feed rock has the geology needed to achieve the superior economics possible with co-production. Thanks to co-production, our process will increase mass and energy efficiency, improve profitability, and be more sustainable compared to conventional processes.
The limits to co-production
Co-production economics also hinge on two important considerations.
1. Products must scale together
Co-production depends on products—or a product suite—that can scale well together. Copper and cobalt illustrate this: cobalt demand is far smaller than copper’s so the world’s copper could not come from cobalt deposits, and it doesn’t. Successful co-production balances the entire product suite and indeed copper-cobalt deposits are just one source of copper.
2. Co-products must be sellable, given geographic constraints
Lower-value, heavy materials like SCM can’t travel far; otherwise, shipping costs will eliminate their value. Thus, it’s only economically viable if produced near end markets. Brimstone has a major advantage: our feedstock is globally abundant and widely distributed, enabling profitable co-production near end markets for co-products like SCM and OPC.
Co-production has transformed commodities—and cement is next
Successfully co-producing cement with other products depends on three conditions:
1. Globally abundant feedstock – Shipping cement long distances is economically unfeasible, so feedstock must be readily available near end markets.
2. Contains a co-product that scales with cement – Cement production exceeds 3 billion tonnes every year. Only a few industries operate at that massive scale: steel (2 billion tonnes each year), SCM (2 billion tonnes each year), and oil, gas, coal, water, and electricity. Only steel and SCM can be co-produced with cement under any known geology. Aluminum is the next closest, with only 70 million tonnes of annual production.
3. Improved mass and energy efficiency – To be profitable, the co-production process must consume less energy, less material, or ideally both.
Silicate rock meets these criteria. Silicate rocks contain Earth’s crust’s five most abundant elements (Ca, O, Fe, Si, Al)—and combined, they can make the four most abundant products: OPC, SCM, steel, and aluminum at compatible scales. Brimstone’s rocks are globally abundant, much like limestone, and widely distributed in nearly every country on Earth.
With co-production at its core, Brimstone is poised to do for cement what Exxon did to the oil industry, what the flash furnace did to the copper industry, or what urea production did to the fertilizer industry: improve efficiency, transform economics, reduce waste, and revolutionize heavy industry—all by creating the Fourth Great Refinery.
