The Biden administration plans to spend up to $6 billion on latest technologies aimed toward reducing carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industries equivalent to steel, cement, chemicals and aluminum, which contribute greatly to global warming but have thus far been extremely difficult to clean up.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday that her agency will partially fund 33 different projects in 20 states aimed toward testing methods to reduce emissions from a wide selection of factories and industrial plants, calling it “the largest single investment in industrial decarbonization in American history.” .
Constellium, an aluminum producer, will receive up to $75 million to construct a first-of-its-kind aluminum casting plant in Ravenswood, Virginia, that will likely be powered by cleaner hydrogen fuels relatively than natural gas.
Food manufacturer Kraft Heinz will receive as much as $170.9 million to install electric boilers and warmth pumps in 10 facilities across the country, where they will likely be used to generate large amounts of heat needed, for instance, to dry pasta without direct combustion of fossil fuels.
The Cleveland-Cliffs steelmaker will receive up to $500 million to help decommission a big carbon-guzzling blast furnace in Middletown, Ohio, and replace it with two furnaces that use electricity to convert scrap into steel. The company would also test ways to produce steel using hydrogen.
While the projects themselves would lead to relatively small reductions in U.S. emissions, Ms. Granholm said their goal was to show novel technologies that may scale quickly and “set a new gold standard for clean manufacturing in the U.S. and around the world.”
Heavy industry is one of the country’s biggest sources of planet-warming pollution, accounting for a couple of quarter of all emissions. Many factories burn coal or natural gas to create the warmth needed to make steam, temper glass, or turn iron into steel. Cement manufacturers emit carbon dioxide as part of the method of converting limestone into cement. Chemical producers use oil and gas as raw materials for his or her products.
Theoretically, there are technologies that may reduce emissions. Industrial heat pumps Or thermal batteries could help factories generate heat from renewable energy. Cement producers could capture and bury their carbon dioxide. Steelmakers could use pure hydrogen as an alternative of coal. However, many of these solutions are expensive and of their infancy.
“This is different from the electricity sector, where the costs of widely available alternatives to fossil fuels, such as wind, solar and batteries, have fallen dramatically,” Morgan Bazilian, a professor of public policy on the Colorado School of Mines, said in a recent interview. “We have yet to see clear winners in the industry at the price we need.”
Policymakers have also been hesitant to limit industrial emissions, fearing that factories and jobs might be moved overseas to places with looser environmental regulations.
While the Biden administration has announced strict limits on carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and power plants, it has thus far avoided similar regulations for industrial sectors equivalent to steel and cement. Instead, the administration focused on financing latest technologies within the hope that they’d turn into cheaper and be widely adopted.
Separately, various federal agencies have announced plans to purchase steel, cement, asphalt and glass made through cleaner processes in an attempt to create a marketplace for low-emission industrial materials.
The money for the projects mentioned in Monday’s announcement comes from the Department of Energy budget Industrial demonstration programwhich was funded by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The 33 chosen projects may have to undergo further negotiations with the agency before receiving final funding.
One of them is Sublime Systems, a startup exploring cleaner ways of producing cement. Traditionally, cement manufacturers burn large amounts of coal or gas to create temperatures exceeding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, which converts limestone to lime and releases carbon dioxide as part of the chemical conversion.
Sublime for a change uses a process powered solely by electricity which doesn’t require extreme temperature or release carbon dioxide. The company tested its technology in a small pilot facility, and an award from the Department of Energy value up to $87 million would help the corporate construct its first business plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
This funding is useful, said Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime. Many novel technologies aimed toward reducing industrial emissions “are too expensive for traditional venture capitalists and too risky for conventional project financiers,” she said. The Department of Energy’s cost-sharing of early projects “accelerates the scale-up of these technologies that must be developed and deployed globally as quickly as possible” to combat climate change.
The Department of Energy could also fund several projects using the brand new technology called thermal energy storagewhich might draw intermittent electricity from wind or solar farms to regularly heat bricks or other materials, which might then be used to generate constant heat for industrial processes.
“The area often cited as the most difficult to decarbonize is the industrial sector,” said Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s national climate adviser. But he added that “these projects are a great example of the breadth and diversity of technologies we can deploy to get the job done on decarbonization.”
