Decarbonizing the Industrial Sector, with Jeffrey Rissman

Notable quotes

• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industry is a must: “Globally, the industrial sector is responsible for about one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. That includes the emissions from electricity purchased by industry. If you exclude that, then the direct emissions from industry are about a quarter of all human-caused emissions, which is still enormous. It’s clear that there’s no way we can solve the climate crisis without addressing industrial emissions.” (4:39)
• Decarbonization through electrification: “Electrification is, I think, the most important and efficient way to get industrial energy use and, specifically, industrial heat. About 85 percent of the fossil fuels combusted in industrial facilities … go toward producing heat … You can get that heat through a variety of technologies, like heat pumps, electrical resistance, electric arcs and plasma torches, microwave heating, and more.” (24:06)
• Policies can drive and accelerate industrial decarbonization: “Policy is critical to driving adoption of cleaner technologies on a faster timescale, making these investments by industry profitable, helping create jobs, and securing the technological leadership for the industries that invest in them. This is already crucially important for the environment. This is only going to become more and more important for industrial firms as the years go on. There’s increasing demand for cleanly produced products, clean steel, clean products made of that steel, and so on.” (25:32)

Top of the Stack

• Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity by Jeffrey Rissman
• Daybreak board game

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi.

Today we talk with Jeffrey Rissman, senior director for industry at Energy Innovation and the author of the new book Zero-Carbon Industry, which comes out this week.

In today's conversation, Jeff will give us a broad overview of the industrial sector, which accounts for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. We'll talk about the options that are available to get to net-zero emissions, particularly in the iron and steel, chemicals, and cement industries. If you don't know much about the industrial sector—or even if you do—today's episode will get you up to speed on how important they are and how technology and policy can help move them toward net-zero emissions. Stay with us.

Jeff Rissman from Energy Innovation, welcome to Resources Radio, and congratulations on your new book, Zero-Carbon Industry.

Jeffrey Rissman: Hi Daniel, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Daniel Raimi: Jeff, we're going to talk about this book today. We've actually had you on the podcast before, but you spoke with my colleague Kristin Hayes, and it was almost four years ago that you were on the podcast. So, it would be great if you could remind our listeners how you got interested in working on environmental issues, whether that inspiration came at an early stage in life or later in your career.

Jeffrey Rissman: Absolutely. I do remember being on the podcast four years ago to talk about industry. But before that, I've always been interested in solving large, important problems facing society, humanity, and the world. I enjoy problems that have the nexus of science and policy, science and policy or politics—understanding how people can work together to solve these challenges we're facing and finding win-win solutions.

I really started pursuing environmental issues seriously in graduate school, where I did a dual masters, one in city and urban planning, where I focused on green planning or green cities and good urban design, and one in environmental science and engineering, so I would have the real technical background. That focused on air quality and emissions and greenhouse gases.

Then, I started with Energy Innovation. I helped found the organization along with Hal Harvey, who was our CEO at the time. I think it was a gradual process of finding where the greatest challenges facing society are and where I felt like I could be the most effective in helping to address them.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. I should note you went to graduate school just down the road from where I grew up and where I went to graduate school. You're a University of North Carolina alum and I'm a Duke alum, but we won't argue about basketball today. It'll have to be another time.

Jeff, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about your new book. Again, the book is called Zero-Carbon Industry. People can get a link to it in the show notes and check it out. The book is organized around the three largest greenhouse gas emitting industries: iron and steel, chemicals, and cement and concrete. We're going to dive into each of those sectors in our conversation. But first, it'd be great if you could give us a little bit of a big-picture background on the industrial sector writ large. For example, how do we define the industrial sector? How significant is it to the global economy, and also how significant is it in terms of its emissions footprint?

Jeffrey Rissman: Sure. The industrial sector, as I see it, and as in this book, Zero-Carbon Industry, which you can find out more about at zerocarbonindustry.com, by the way, is essentially the set of businesses that make all of the stuff that we use every day. That's materials like cement and concrete, paper and plastic, as well as parts and components and finished goods, whether it's personal electronics or paperback books, or any other thing that you're going to be putting in your hands, or buildings you live in or the vehicles you ride in. So, it's enormously important to human society.

It's also enormously important for emissions. Globally, the industrial sector is responsible for about one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. That includes the emissions from electricity purchased by industry. If you exclude that, then the direct emissions from industry are about a quarter of all human-caused emissions, which is still enormous. It's clear that there's no way we can solve the climate crisis without addressing industrial emissions.

Industry is also a key source of high-quality jobs. It's a large share of the economy of numerous countries. It varies by country, of course. But with China, for example, being a very large share—more than half, I believe, depending on how it's measured. It's also a technological leader. Industrial firms are often the ones that are doing research and development and pioneering new technologies and manufacturing processes and the technologies that are incorporated into their products. Industry is going to be the one manufacturing all the batteries, all the electric vehicles, all the solar panels, all the wind turbines—every technology we need in order to decarbonize the economy and land on a clean, prosperous, and sustainable future. From every angle, from technology to environment to jobs to emissions, industry is really central.

Daniel Raimi: That's a great starting point. As I mentioned, we're going to focus on three particular sectors, and I'd love for us to dive right in and talk about iron and steel, first. Can you tell us a little bit about iron and steel? I think our audience will be particularly interested in the actual physical processes that are used to manufacture these materials. Then, what are some of the most promising pathways technologically for getting to net-zero iron and steel in a way that is economically viable?

Jeffrey Rissman: Absolutely. Iron and steel is, globally, the industry that has the greatest emissions. I'll break down the processes a little bit, but first I'll note that steel is a very important material, because it is so strong and so versatile and also made from iron ore, which is broadly distributed globally, so it's not hard to get or concentrated like rare-earth minerals. It's used everywhere and is crucial in buildings and vehicles and all kinds of products.

Iron and steel are chemically similar. Iron is an element, and steel is iron with some carbon added to it for strength. Overwhelmingly these days, we use steel. Iron is just 1 or 2 percent of the production, but the materials are so similar that we can speak of them as together.

I'll talk about steel. It can come from either recycled steel or secondary steel or primary steel, which means from iron ore. Secondary steel is when you collect scrap steel from cars, old demolished cars or buildings, or even recycled steel cans and things and melt them down in a machine called an electric arc furnace, which uses electricity to form it into new steel.

Then, primary steel is made in a blast furnace, a tall machine that takes iron ore, which is a type of rock—hematite or magnetite—that has iron atoms bound to oxygen atoms. The heat and chemicals from coal and coke—coke is a carbon-based fuel made from coal—are added to the blast furnace, and they extract the oxygen atoms and leave metallic iron behind. That goes on into another step called a basic oxygen furnace and forms steel. So, the reason it has such high emissions is from the primary steelmaking—from this process I described with the blast furnace—because of that combustion of coal and coke.

Moving now on to decarbonizing—how to get clean steel. We could recycle more. That's pretty clean. The electric arc furnaces do have a little bit of emissions. They have some natural gas burners around the edges, though those aren't strictly necessary, and you could run it without them. On average, today, they produce 7 percent as much emissions as primary steel. But the real problem there is you run out of scrap steel to recycle. Recycling rates are already high in many countries, like the United States, where much of the steel is not from municipal solid waste. It's from buildings, vehicles, or even what's called “forming and fabrication” scrap, which is in the steel plants. That’s the little bits and pieces that are left over get thrown back and recycled.

Even if you bumped up the recycling rate further, there's a limit. You can't recycle more than 100 percent of the scrap, and that wouldn't be nearly enough to satisfy the demand for steel. We need a way to decarbonize primary steelmaking. The foremost technology to do that is called hydrogen direct-reduced iron. It’s foremost in the sense of most technologically mature. This is where you take clean hydrogen, typically made by taking renewable electricity and splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then use hydrogen instead of coal and coke to chemically reduce, meaning remove the oxygen atoms, from that iron ore. This is also done at lower temperatures, so you save some energy there. Then, the resulting product, which is called direct reduced iron, goes into an electric arc furnace and is turned into steel.

The less technologically mature routes are electrolysis, meaning taking electricity and using it to split those oxygen atoms off without involving hydrogen. That can be done at high temperatures using molten oxide electrolysis, or in a water-based or aqueous solution—aqueous electrolysis. My book, Zero-Carbon Industry, talks about each of these and the efficiency and some of the technological considerations and some of the companies that are pioneering these technologies.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. Clearly, we're just kind of scratching the surface here on all sorts of complex processes and complex issues. People certainly should check out the book to go into more depth.

But because we're just kind of scratching the surface here, let's scratch the surface on another sector, which is the chemical sector. Similar question to iron and steel. Can you give us a sense of how bulk chemicals are manufactured, where the emissions come from, and then, again, what some of the most promising pathways are for economically transitioning to net-zero chemicals?

Jeffrey Rissman: Absolutely. The chemicals industry produces a lot of the products that are familiar. Plastics is one of the main outputs: the plastic resins that go on to be formed into various plastic packaging, plastic parts, pipes, goods, as well as fertilizer. They produce ammonia that goes on to be made into fertilizer, which is used extensively, and miscellaneous other products like adhesives and paints and coatings and personal care products like soaps and detergents and so on.

In the chemicals industry, some of the energy use is for producing certain non-petrochemicals—let's say purified gases like pure oxygen, which is taken from the atmosphere. But the vast majority of the chemicals industry's energy use is producing a set of chemicals that we would call ammonia and petrochemicals. They use fossil fuels today to make these chemicals. Fossil fuels that are used to form products are called feedstocks or feedstock fossil fuels, as opposed to fossil fuels that are burned for heat or combusted.

In the United States, natural gas, for example, goes through a process called steam-methane reforming, where they extract the carbon from natural gas, which is largely methane, or CH4. That carbon becomes carbon dioxide and is emitted, and then the remaining hydrogen is attached to nitrogen to make ammonia. Ammonia is a precursor to fertilizers. Similarly, other petrochemicals like methanol and ethylene and propylene, which are predecessors to plastics, come from petroleum—that's why they're called petrochemicals. Then, plastic is a petrochemical product.

There's heat that drives these chemical reactions, and the best way to decarbonize that is to supply the heat with zero-carbon electricity. The unique thing about the chemicals industry is actually trying to decarbonize the feedstocks in addition to the heat. That matters, because even if you're not burning those feedstocks, there were emissions when they were produced. For example, when you extract natural gas from the ground, there's methane that leaks from the wellheads of those gas wells. Or, similarly for coal—say there's coalbed methane that leaks when you mine the coal. Then, there are what's called process emissions. There are more carbon atoms in the feedstocks than there are in the output products like fertilizers and plastics. The difference in carbon atoms ends up getting emitted along the way in what we would call “carbon dioxide process emissions.”

Finally, some of those products are not permanent, secure stores of carbon. Urea-based fertilizers contain carbon, and they will volatilize after they're applied to a field and spread out in the environment. The carbon doesn't stay trapped. Plastics can last longer, but about a quarter of all end-of-life plastics are incinerated today. That share is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2050, which of course releases the carbon in them and so on. So, this isn't a secure way of storing carbon. We need to decarbonize the feedstocks that we make these products out of.

The chemicals industry is a little complicated. I will say that the main roots involve clean hydrogen. You can use hydrogen made from renewable electricity, like I mentioned before for steel, to make ammonia. That's straightforward, because it doesn't contain carbon, and it's the same process as you would get with steam-methane reforming, which produces hydrogen. You just obtain the hydrogen differently, and, from that point on, it's the same.

Other petrochemicals are a little trickier. You can form them from hydrogen and combine them with captured carbon from another process. You can make methanol that way and make other chemicals from methanol, or you can use biomass or bioenergy, if it's sustainably grown and doesn't result in unfavorable land use changes like deforestation. Then, there's recycling. So, you can do some amount of recycling—recycle chemicals to get feedstocks out of products again. Those would be the main ways to produce zero-carbon feedstocks.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Let's jump now to the third industrial sector that your book focuses on, cement and concrete. Similar questions—give us a sense of how they're manufactured, where the emissions come from, and then what some of the most promising pathways might be for decarbonization.

Jeffrey Rissman: Absolutely. Concrete is this compound material. It's basically a mixture of aggregate, which is sand and crushed rock that is bound together with cement, which is the glue that holds all this stuff together and makes it a solid. The aggregate is not the emissions-intense part of concrete. It doesn't require that much energy, and you can crush rock using electricity. The challenging part is the cement, the binder. Today, that's made by taking limestone, which is calcium carbonate rock, and breaking it down chemically at high temperatures in a kiln and also a precalciner, a machine that begins the process before the materials move into the kiln. It has emissions of carbon dioxide of two types. One is from burning fossil fuels to heat the kiln. Today, it's mostly coal that's burned to heat cement kilns. That's responsible for about 40 percent or a little more of the carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon dioxide comes out of the carbonate rocks, calcium carbonate, leaving lime, which goes on to make clinker, the main ingredient in cement, and carbon dioxide. Today, the carbon dioxide escapes from the kiln and enters the atmosphere. So, the key to decarbonizing the cement and concrete industry is to decarbonize cement making. Heat for the kiln you can provide electrically. There's a company, Cementa, that has demonstrated this. You can do this at a small scale, but it is something that can be done using various electrical heating technologies.

For the process emissions, you can capture them using carbon capture. Now, I think there's only narrow niches for carbon capture, because, generally, especially if you're using it for fossil fuel combustion, it's better to avoid burning the fossil fuels instead. But for capturing emissions from carbonate rock, there are fewer good options, and it's one of these places where carbon capture is most attractive.

There's also alternative cement chemistries that have fewer or potentially no emissions, although, then, there are hurdles to be overcome in approvals of the technology for use in buildings and infrastructure. It has to be safe. Ideally, it would protect the steel reinforcements inside and reinforce concrete from corrosion. Standard concrete does that, but carbon-infused concrete and certain alternative chemistries do not necessarily provide a barrier against corroding the steel reinforcements inside. There are certain challenges, but there are clear technological pathways forward. And that's even before we reach options like material efficiency, which can lower the need for cement and for concrete.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Those are all really good explanations and very interesting alternatives. Let's move away from the specific industries now and talk about some cross-cutting technologies that you focus on in the book. You just talked about carbon capture and sequestration. You highlight other technologies that might be useful for a range of applications across multiple industries. And I know, again, we could talk about this for hours, but it would be great if you could give us the high-level overview of what some of these technologies might look like.

Jeffrey Rissman: Sure. I'll give a quick overview. If your listeners want more, they can go to zerocarbonindustry.com and grab the book there. There's actually a 20 percent– off discount code for your listeners there. It'll have much more on each of these.

But there are cross-cutting technologies that are cross-cutting, meaning they're going to be useful for decarbonizing many different industrial processes—not just the cement chemicals and steel, but also wood products and textiles and food making and manufacturing of vehicles and all the rest. My book puts front and center in this section energy efficiency, and then material efficiency, material substitution, and circular economy, because the only technology that's cheaper than making something more cleanly is making less of it—not needing to use as much material or energy to make it.

In terms of energy efficiency, I'll have to keep this very brief, but it can be done at the level of products, at the level of entire industrial facilities, or even at decisions broader than that, like how to design products and how to arrange supply chains. For material efficiency, you can often design goods in ways that provide equal or better services to the end user while using less material, less waste. There are plenty of examples.

One quick one is that, today, buildings are built, like in poured concrete, with these molds made of wood boards that have these sharp angles. Often, the bit sticking out in the corner there isn't load bearing. It isn't needed to support the building's weight. In fact, it can add weight because it's excess material and means you have to have a heavier, bulkier foundation. If you use curved fabric molds and similar techniques, you can place the concrete only where you actually need it for structural strength, which makes the building lighter, so you can use less material there, too. It can make the building more pleasant, because it can be a lighter, airier feel for occupants.

Circular economy is about longevity of products and reusing the products and materials. The other key technologies that I haven't already mentioned are electrification and use of hydrogen and other renewable fuels. Electrification is, I think, the most important and efficient way to get industrial energy use and, specifically, industrial heat. About 85 percent of the fossil fuels combusted in industrial facilities—not feedstocks, but the fuels that are combusted—go toward producing heat. This chapter highlights how you can get that heat through a variety of technologies, like heat pumps, electrical resistance, electric arcs and plasma torches, microwave heating, and more.

Lastly, the chapter on hydrogen and other renewable fuels covers how best to form clean hydrogen and hydrogen-derived clean fuels, how to transport them, and how they're best used to decarbonize industry.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. Jeff, I want to ask you one last question before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is of course about policy. Policy will play an enormous role in shaping the incentives that the industrial sector faces and that consumers face. In the short amount of time we have left, and I know this is unfair to ask you to do it so briefly, but what do you see as the role of policymakers, and what are some of the most effective incentives that you think might be particularly well suited for the industrial sector?

Jeffrey Rissman: Sure. I think policy is critical to driving adoption of cleaner technologies on a faster timescale and making it so that these investments by industry are profitable and help create jobs and secure the technological leadership for the industries that invest in them. This is already crucially important for the environment. This is only going to become more and more important for industrial firms as the years go on. There's increasing demand for cleanly produced products, clean steel, clean products made of that steel, and so on.

Key policies include financial policies such as financial incentives, rebates on clean equipment and fees on inefficient equipment, or financing policies that help firms upgrade their equipment lines, like co-lending or loan guarantees and loan loss reserves—basically, tools that make cheaper financing available to industry.

There's also standards and green public procurement and energy efficiency standards, which set a minimum efficiency level for equipment, and emissions standards. Green public procurement is one of my favorites, where the government, which is a major purchaser of steel and cement for its roads, bridges, and buildings, can choose to spend some of its budget on cleanly produced materials made through innovative processes and help drive those new manufacturing technologies down their learning curves, making them cheaper and more large scale for everyone.

There's also research-and-development support policies, which involve national labs and funding and science, technology, math, education, labeling and disclosure, and circular economy support. Lastly, the book has an entire chapter devoted to equity and human development, which is about how to shape the policies in a way that ensures that the transition to clean industry benefits countries and people worldwide and doesn't leave any communities behind.

Daniel Raimi: That's really important and interesting. Thank you for giving us such a quick rundown. I'm sorry we don't have time to go into as much depth as I know you would like and I would like and, probably, our listeners would like, but that's why there's a whole book. The book is called Zero-Carbon Industry. Folks can check it out at the website that Jeff mentioned.

Let's close our conversation out with the same question we ask all our guests, which is to recommend something that you've read or watched or heard that you think is really great and that you'd recommend to our listeners. Jeff, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Jeffrey Rissman: Absolutely. I'm going to recommend a board game called Daybreak. It's a cooperative board game about solving climate change. It's by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. Matt Leacock was the designer of Pandemic, a well-known earlier cooperative board game about stopping a pandemic. But Daybreak is actually fascinating. It has technologies that you would be familiar with—even ones we discussed today, like heat pumps. It involves working together across different countries and different parts of the world to solve this problem together.

It helps highlight the challenge and shows some of the interactions between the need to meet energy demand while also transitioning to clean industry and clean electricity. It's just a great experience. It's fun; it's informative. Every card even has a QR code on it that takes you to a website where you learn more about that particular technology or that particular policy option. They have a website about it, daybreakgame.org. A fun thing to check out.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds really fun. That sounds like the sort of thing we should have in the RFF lunchroom and play at happy hours and stuff like that.

Well, one more time, Jeff Rissman from Energy Innovation, thanks so much for writing this really fascinating book. Thank you for coming onto the show and sharing it with our listeners. We really appreciate it.

Jeffrey Rissman: Thank you, Daniel. Really appreciate the opportunity to share my book Zero-Carbon Industry with your listeners.

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