Today: Thermal batteries store heat instead of electricity, and can be recharged and discharged over and over; NOAA official says AI will overhaul weather forecasting; EU carbon-removal credits get Nasdaq backing.

Welcome back: More than two millennia ago, not far from Pompeii, Roman builders hit upon a formula for concrete that allowed them to build bigger, stronger and more durable structures than ever.

Today, their science is the heart of a new kind of cement-based battery, one that stores heat instead of electricity. When combined with cheap, renewable sources of energy, this new take on old tech has the potential to displace much of the natural gas and other fossil fuels used for heating.

That’s big, reports the Journal's Christopher Mims. About 20% of all global energy is used to produce heat for industry, and a further 10% is used to heat homes and water, according to the International Energy Agency.

The chemistry and engineering of this novel cement battery is deliberately simple, so as to make it scalable and cost-competitive. Take quicklime, otherwise known as calcium oxide, and just add water. The result is calcium hydroxide—ancient Roman cement.

This reaction releases a great deal of heat. But it is also reversible: Add enough heat back to cement, and you can drive out the water and produce quicklime once more. When done right, it’s possible to recharge, discharge and recharge it again, many times. Just like a battery.

Now a 10-person startup called Cache Energy, working out of a 10,000-square-foot facility in Champaign, Ill., says it has figured out how to make such a cement battery durable, efficient and affordable.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is teaching artificial intelligence models hundreds of years of weather data to modernize forecasting, an agency official said at a conference Tuesday.

WSJ Pro's Clara Hudson writes that NOAA recently announced a suite of AI weather prediction models to speed up forecasts and make them more accurate, which the U.S. federal agency said will help meteorologists and the public better anticipate everything from flooding to hurricanes.

There have been concerns about staff cuts at NOAA under the Trump administration, which sparked worries about access to weather information across the country. The U.S. has seen erratic weather in recent months, ranging from a rare snowfall in Alabama to destructive flooding in Hawaii and a heat dome in the Southwest.

NOAA’s National Hurricane Center has said AI can accelerate forecasting, with the guidance of scientists. But while there is a lot of promise in using AI assistance to track hurricanes, “lives and property would be at greater risk” without experts overseeing it to constantly evaluate the results, the center’s Science and Operations Officer Wallace Hogsett said last month.

Nasdaq is among a group of investors backing a carbon-capture project in Stockholm through what is the first sale of carbon-removal credits licensed by the European Union. The EU initiative aims to spur further investment in a system potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Journal's Joshua Kirby reports that EU policymakers hope a step-up in the flow of corporate cash for removals of carbon can help it achieve its ambitious goal of emissions neutrality within the coming decades. But critics warn that the removal of polluting gases already emitted shouldn’t replace efforts to cut emissions in the first place.

The Stockholm facility, operated by energy provider Stockholm Exergi, will take carbon-laden agricultural and woody residues and produce energy for heating and electricity, in a process known as BECCS—bio energy with carbon capture and storage. The leftover carbon dioxide will be stored in bedrock beneath the North Sea and will gradually mineralize over time.

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• Radisson Hotel Group is aiming to have 100 Verified Net Zero hotels globally by 2030. (ESG Today)
   
• Enagas shares jumped to a two-year high after Spain’s CNMC set a framework for new renewable gas incentives. (WSJ)
   
• After decades of aversion to nuclear power, states are welcoming developers of the the clean energy source. (Canary Media)
   
• A cyclone has affected Australian LNG plants, adding pressure to a market already reeling from disruption caused by the Iran war. (WSJ)
   
• EVs, solar panels and heat pumps are becoming more attractive as the Middle East conflict upends oil and gas markets. (Bloomberg)
   
• The war in Iran is revealing the messy middle of the renewable energy transition. (NYT)
   
• Oil and gas companies including Equinor and Shell have called for the EU to drop an effective ban on future drilling in the Arctic. (FT)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send your comments to editor Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at perrycp, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.