Decarbonisation of industrial activities is beginning

By Vijay Vaitheeswaran

The first shots of the nascent “brown-to-green” revolution will be fired in 2024. In the global effort to tackle climate change, governments have focused on cleaning up the generation of electricity by promoting renewables, and greening transportation by boosting electric cars. So far, industrial sectors such as steel, cement, manufacturing and petrochemicals have escaped serious scrutiny.

That is because it can be difficult and costly to tackle emissions from industrial activities. Many involve high-temperature heat or chemical processes (such as steelmaking in blast furnaces) for which fossil-fuel inputs, like coal and natural gas, are not easily replaced by electricity. The only viable alternative for many industrial firms today is to use carbon-capture equipment bolted onto existing kit, but this is expensive and cumbersome. Fossil inputs can be replaced by hydrogen and ammonia made with clean energy, but these have been slow to take off.