Activity 6 – Mitigating Climate Change – The Industrial Sector

How to Lower Industry-Sector Emissions

Making planes and skyscrapers, computers and pharmaceuticals—the products that define life in the modern world—has caused a great deal of climate change. Their manufacture involves industrial products like steel, cement, plastic, and chemicals. Creating those raw materials releases a lot of greenhouse gas. As the world’s population and economy grow, the demand for those products grows as well.

All that production makes up the industry sector. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the industry sector accounts for around 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. So, to tackle climate change, the world urgently needs to develop greener and more sustainable industrial practices.

This lesson explores how the industry sector is contributing to climate change and how building a greener industrial sector will require many innovative approaches.

The next page of this lesson contains a video explaining how industry contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as some of the new technologies that can help mitigate those emissions. Play the video. As it plays, think through the following questions:

• How does industry lead to both direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions?
• How can new technologies help humans mitigate emissions from the industrial sector?

What is Holding Back Industry-Sector Mitigation?

Part of the challenge is that the technology isn’t advanced enough yet. Even in the cases where experts understand how to fully eliminate carbon emission from industrial production, the new technology is not yet commercially viable on a large scale.

Even if scientists had everything figured out, there would still be enormous costs to transitioning industrial operations quickly. Most plants in heavy industry are designed and financed to operate for a long time, typically thirty or forty years. Stopping production to retrofit a plant or shutting it down earlier than expected would likely incur major financial losses for the owners. So, widespread adoption of new emissions-reducing technology in the industrial sector could be relatively slow. In many cases, industrial operators are likely to wait until older equipment wears down before replacing it with newer, low-emissions technology.

Industry-Sector Mitigation: What Can Be Done?

The following new technologies and approaches, among others, can help reduce industrial emissions.

• Hydrogen: This clean fuel doesn’t produce any CO₂ when it’s used. Hydrogen burns at high temperatures, and it is easily capable of producing the heat required for many industrial processes like steelmaking. Today, though, most hydrogen is produced from natural gas (emitting CO₂). Zero-carbon hydrogen production is still in its infancy as a technology. However, developing it could replace fossil fuels in high heat production facilities and reduce process emissions from ammonia and petrochemical production.
• Electrification: Although electrical heating isn’t suitable for higher-temperature industrial processes yet, advances are being made. Electricity-based techniques could someday be an economically viable replacement for burning fossil fuels. Researchers are also developing ways to use electricity at certain points in steel and cement production to reduce their process emissions as well.
• Carbon capture: Exhaust from burning fossil fuels, chemical reactions, and waste management could be directly filtered, capturing the greenhouse gas. The gas would then be compressed and either reused or permanently stored so it doesn’t get released into the atmosphere. Directly capturing carbon from industrial production is expensive, and it requires using additional energy. Nevertheless, the International Energy Agency projects that carbon capture will play a significant role in reducing industrial emissions in its net-zero emissions scenarios for the next few decades.
• Alternative feedstocks: Fossil fuel–derived petrochemicals could be replaced by other sources. Those include hydrogen, captured CO₂, biomass (possibly from agricultural waste), and ethanol, which can be made by fermenting corn.

What is Being Done?

Policymakers are directing investment toward the high costs of developing greener industries.

The U.S. Congress provided over $6 billion for the federal Industrial Demonstrations program. The program uses that money to help fund industrial projects that could demonstrate the commercial viability of new low-emissions technology and production processes. All thirty-three projects the program supports are in the United States. They feature a diverse array of green advances—incorporating hydrogen, electricity, and biomass. They also include finding lower-emission inputs and novel ways of capturing and storing carbon dioxide.

New technology isn’t the only answer, though.

Many governments are encouraging the formation of eco-industrial parks. Those are locations where different manufacturers cluster together and share resources, allowing for greater economic and environmental efficiencies. Parks also open up opportunities for the waste from one industrial practice to be used as an input for another manufacturer. For example, at the eco-industrial park in Ulsan, South Korea, steam from an industrial waste incinerator is used to help power a nearby paper mill. Also, wastewater from a different petrochemical plant is used as an input in a sewage treatment facility.