Industrial Decarbonization: U.S. Department of Energy Releases Roadmap

The United States Department of Energy (“DOE”) issued a document titled:

DOE Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap (“Roadmap”)

The Roadmap was prepared by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.

The industrial sector is argued to be among the most difficult to decarbonize. It is stated to account for one-third of all domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

The Roadmap proposes a staged research, development and demonstration agenda for industry and government. A 104 million funding opportunity is provided to advance industrial decarbonization technologies.

A focus of the Roadmap is what it describes as five key industrial sectors which include:

• Iron and Steel
• Cement and Concrete
• Food and Beverage
• Chemical Manufacturing
• Petroleum Refining

The four pathways that DOE believes could reduce emissions in such sectors include:

• Energy efficiency (described as the most-effective option for near-term reductions of greenhouse gas emissions)
• Industrial electrification (described as leveraging advancements in low-carbon electricity from both grid and onsite renewable generation sources)
• Low carbon fuels, feedstocks, and energy sources (describing efforts involving substituting low-and-no-carbon fuel and feedstocks)
• Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (describing decarbonization efforts which include permanent geologic storage as well as developing processes to use captured CO2 to manufacture new materials)

Research, development, and demonstration suggested for industry and government to undertake to achieve decarbonization are listed as:

• Advance early-stage research, development, and demonstration
• Investment in multiple process strategies
• Scale through demonstrations
• Address process heating efficiency and emissions across all sub-sectors
• Decarbonize electricity sources
• Integrate solutions
• Conduct modeling and system analysis

A link to the DOE Roadmap can be downloaded here.