Preface. Cement, steel, glass, bricks, ceramics, chemicals, and much more depend on fossil-fueled high heat (up to 3200 F) to make. Except for the electric-arc furnace to recycle existing steel, there aren’t any renewable ways to make cement, other metals, and other high-heat products, and industries aren’t working on this either.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

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Roberts, D. 2019. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. Low-carbon options for heavy industry like steel and cement are scarce and expensive. Vox

Climate activists are fond of saying that we have all the solutions we need to the climate crisis; all we lack is the political will. This is incorrect. There are some uses of fossil fuels, that we do not yet know how to decarbonize.

Take, for instance, industrial heat: the extremely high-temperature heat used to make steel and cement.

Heavy industry is responsible for around 22% of global CO2 emissions, with 42% of that — about 10% of global emissions — from combustion to produce large amounts of high-temperature heat for industrial products like cement, steel, and petrochemicals.

To put that in perspective, industrial heat’s 10% is greater than the CO2 emissions of all the world’s cars (6%) and planes (2%) combined. Yet, consider how much you hear about electric vehicles. Consider how much you hear about flying shame. Now consider how much you hear about … industrial heat.

Not much, I’m guessing. But the fact is, today, virtually all of that combustion is fossil-fueled, and there are very few viable low-carbon alternatives. For all kinds of reasons, industrial heat is going to be one of the toughest nuts to crack, carbon-wise. And we haven’t even gotten started.

Some light has been cast into this blind spot with the release of two new reports by Julio Friedmann, a researcher at the Center for Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University (among many items on a long résumé).

The first report, co-authored with CGEP’s Zhiyuan Fan and Ke Tang, is about the current state of industrial heat technology: “Low-Carbon Heat Solutions for Heavy Industry: Sources, Options, and Costs Today.”

The second, co-authored with a group of scholars for the Innovation for Cool Earth Forum (ICEF), is a roadmap for decarbonizing industrial heat, including a set of policy recommendations.

There’s a lot in these reports, but I’m going to guess your patience for industrial heat is limited, so I’ve boiled it down to three sections. First, I’ll offer a quick overview of why industrial heat is so infernally difficult to decarbonize; second, a review of the options available for decarbonizing it; and third, some recommendations for how to move forward.

Why industrial heat is such a vexing carbon dilemma

There’s a reason you don’t hear much about industrial heat: Consumers don’t buy it. It is a market dominated entirely by large, little-known industrial firms that operate outside the public eye. So unlike electricity, or cars, there is little prospect of moving the market through popular consumer demand. Policymakers will have to do this on their own. And it won’t be easy.

The biggest industrial emitters are cement, steel, and the chemical industries; also making a notable contribution are refining, fertilizer, and glass. As a group, these industries have three notable features.

First, almost all of them are globally traded commodities. Their prices are not set domestically. They compete with optimized supply chains around the world, with razor-thin margins. Domestic policies that raise their prices risk “carbon leakage” (i.e., companies simply moving overseas to find cheaper labor and operating environments).

What’s more, some of these industries, especially cement and steel, are especially prized by national governments for their jobs and their national security implications. Politicians are leery of any policy that might push those industries away. “As one indication, most cement, steel, aluminum, and petrochemicals have received environmental waivers or been politically exempted from carbon limits,” says the CGEP report, “even in countries with stringent carbon targets.

Second, they involve facilities and equipment meant to last between 20 and 50 years. Blast furnaces sometimes make it to 60. These are large, long-term capital investments, with relatively low stock turnover. “Few industrial facilities show signs of imminent closure, especially in developing countries,” the CGEP report says, “making deployment of replacement facilities and technologies problematic.” At the very least, solutions that can work with existing equipment will have a head start.

Third, their operational requirements are both stringent and varied. They all have in common that they require large amounts of high-temperature heat and high “heat flux,” the ability to deliver large amounts of heat steadily, reliably, and continuously. Downtime in these industries is incredibly expensive.

At the same time, the specific requirements and processes at work in these industries vary widely. To take one example, steel and iron are made using blast furnaces that burn coke (a form of “cooked” coal with high-carbon content). “Coke also provides carbon as a reductant, acts as structural support to hold the ore burden, and provides porosity for rising hot gas and sinking molten iron,” the CGEP report says. “Because of these multiple roles, directly replacing coke combustion with an alternative source of process heat is not practical.”

A cement kiln works somewhat differently, as do the reactors that power chemical conversions, as does a glassblower. The variety of specific operational characteristics makes across-the-board substitution for industrial heat difficult.

Each of these industries is going to require its own solution. And it’s going to have to be a solution that doesn’t raise their costs much or at least takes steps to protect them from international competition.

The options to date are not much to speak of.

The options for decarbonizing industrial heat are scarce

What are the alternatives that might provide high heat and high heat flux with less or no carbon emissions? The report is not sanguine: “The pathway toward net-zero carbon emission for industry is not clear, and only a few options appear viable today.”

Alternatives can be broken down into five basic categories:

1. Biomass: Either biodiesel or woodchips can be combusted directly.
2. Electricity: “Resistive” electricity can be used to, say, power an electric arc furnace.
3. Hydrogen: This is technically a subcategory of electricity, since it is derived from processes powered by electricity; it is produced through steam reforming of methane (SMR) to make carbon-intensive “grey” hydrogen, SMR with carbon capture and storage to make “blue” hydrogen, or electrolysis, pulling hydrogen directly out of water, to make low-carbon “green” hydrogen.
4. Nuclear: Nuclear power plants, either conventional reactors or new third-generation reactors, give off heat that can be carried as steam.
5. Carbon capture and storage (CCS): Rather than decarbonizing the processes themselves, their CO2 emissions could be captured and buried, either the CO2 directly from the heat source (“heat CCS”) or the CO2 from the entire facility (“full facility CCS”).

All of these options have their difficulties and drawbacks. None of them is anywhere close to cost parity with existing processes.

Some are limited by the intensity of the heat they can produce. Here’s a breakdown:

Some options are limited by the specific requirements of particular industrial processes. Cement kilns work better with energy-dense internal fuel; resistive electricity on the outer surface doesn’t work as well.

But the biggest limitations are costs, where the news is somewhat disheartening, for two reasons.

First, even the most promising and viable options substantially raise operational costs. And second, the options that are currently the least expensive are not exactly the ones environmentalists might prefer.

There’s a lot in the report on the methodology of comparing costs across the technologies, but the main thing to keep in mind is that these cost estimates are provisional. They involve various contestable assumptions, and real performance data is often not available. So it’s all to be taken with a grain of salt, pending further research. That said, here’s a rough-and-ready cost comparison:

You might notice that most of the blue bars, the low-carbon options, are way over on the expensive right. The only ones that are reasonably affordable are nuclear and blue hydrogen.

Hydrogen is the most promising alternative

In terms of ability to generate high-temperature heat, availability, and suitability to multiple purposes, hydrogen is probably the leading candidate among industrial-heat alternatives. Unfortunately, the cost equation on hydrogen is not good: the cleaner it is, the more expensive it is.

The cheapest way to produce hydrogen, the way around 95 percent of it is now produced, is steam methane reforming (SMR), which reacts steam with methane in the presence of a catalyst at high temperatures and pressures. It is an extremely carbon-intensive process, thus “grey hydrogen.”

The carbon emissions from SMR can be captured and buried via CCS (though they rarely are today). As the chart above indicates, this kind of “blue hydrogen” is the cheapest low(er) carbon alternative for high-temperature industrial heat.

“Green hydrogen” is made via electrolysis, using electricity to separate hydrogen from water. If it is made with carbon-free energy, it too is carbon-free. There are a few different forms of electrolysis, which we don’t need to get into. The main thing to know is that they are expensive — the least expensive is more than twice as expensive as blue hydrogen.

Here’s a simplified cost chart, to make these comparisons clearer:

Note: These numbers reflect “what is actionable today within existing facilities.”

For now, to a first approximation, all the available low-carbon alternatives substantially raise costs of industrial-heat processes against the baseline.

And here’s the real kicker: in most cases, it is cheaper to capture and bury CO2 from these processes than it is to switch out systems for low-carbon alternatives.

CCS is often cheaper than low-carbon alternatives

Take cement production. It requires temperatures of at least 1,450°C, so the only viable options are hydrogen, biomass, resistive electric, or CCS. Here’s how much they would increase cement (“clinker”) production costs:

As you can see, every low-carbon alternative raises costs more than 50 percent above baseline. The only ones that don’t raise it more than 100 percent are CCS (of the heat source only), blue hydrogen, or resistive electric in places with extremely cheap and plentiful carbon-free energy.

The alternative that climate hawks would most prefer, the carbon-free option that would work best for most applications, is green hydrogen. But that currently raises costs between 400 and 800 percent. Ouch.

The situation is much the same for steel:

And so on down the line, from chemicals to glass to ceramics; In almost every case, the cheapest near-term decarbonization solution is just to capture and bury the carbon emissions.

Of course, that’s just on average. The actual costs will depend on geography — whether there are suitable burial sites for CO2, whether natural gas is cheap, whether there’s a lot of hydro or wind nearby — but there’s no getting around the simple truth about today’s industrial-heat alternatives: What’s green isn’t very feasible, and what’s feasible isn’t very green.

Here’s a qualitative chart that tries to get at that relationship.

What’s most feasible is on the right. What’s most expensive is up top. There isn’t much in that lower-right feasible/cheap quadrant except blue hydrogen, for now.

The report emphasizes that these initial technology rankings are “temporary at best” and “highly speculative, uncertain, and contingent.” Much more needs to be understood about the costs and feasibility of these options. Their relative attractiveness may change quickly with technology development.

As this list makes clear, there is a lot that needs to be done before “we have all the solutions we need” in heavy industrial sectors. And there are other sectors that remain difficult to decarbonize as well (shipping, heavy freight, airplanes).

A final note about electrification

The only technology solution with a potential path down the cost curve to the point of being competitive with (properly priced) fossil fuels is electrification.

The charts above reveal two things about electrification of industrial heat. One, resistive electricity is the only low-carbon industrial-heat option competitive with CCS or blue hydrogen, and that’s only where clean electricity is extremely cheap and plentiful. And two, the only truly carbon-free, unlimited, all-purpose alternative available is green hydrogen, which requires plentiful renewable energy.

Both argue for the absolute imperative of making clean electricity cheaper.

At current prices and with current technologies, an all or mostly renewable grid would have difficulty with industrial heat, which requires enormous, intensive amounts of energy, reliably and continuously supplied. Some industrial applications could shift their demand around in time to accommodate renewables or make their processes intermittent, but most can’t. They need controllable, dispatchable power.

Building a renewable-based grid that could handle heavy industry would require much cheaper and more energy-dense storage, more and better transmission, smarter meters and appliances, and better demand response, but above all, it would require extremely cheap and abundant carbon-free electricity.