Our Story
The Calera story really began in 1984, when Brent Constantz was a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Constantz had a coveted National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship grant, entitled "The Skeletal Ultrastructure of Scleractinian Corals”, allowing him to study coral growth mechanisms in the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific, as well as the deep sea and temperate latitudes. His insights about the physiochemically-dominated skeletogentic mechanism of reef coral led to Norian SRS, a market leading biomimetic biomineral bone cement used today in most operating rooms that perform orthopedic surgery. Before he became aware of the global epidemic of osteoporosis, he 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.
Having initially met Vinod Khosla in 1987, and having learned of Khosla’s interest in clean technology, Constantz contacted Khosla in 2007 with his idea about a new "green cement" to replace the carbon-intensive Portland cement, the third largest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Khosla saw the value of the 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 their facility in Los Gatos in a water trailer. In October 2007, while Khosla was visiting the Los Gatos laboratory, the team noted that 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?”
The name Calera is Spanish means lime-kiln (n.) or Calcareous (adj.).
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