A new answer to the biggest climate conundrum

Feb 15th 2024

생산과정에서 고온이 필요한 공장이 내뿜는 탄소를 어떻게 줄일까?
기존에는 CCS, 수소가 있었는데 여기에 heat pump가 새로운 대안으로 등장

Will electrification of industry live up to its promise?

electricity needs to become even more versatile. One of the key challenges is providing heat to industry. If you want to dry, cure, melt, smelt, set, distil, reform or otherwise change the state of something, as industrial processing so often does, heat tends to be involved. In 2016 providing such “process heat” produced almost seven gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions, roughly 20% of all those from fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide produced at the plant where the fuel is burned could be pumped into an underground repository, a process called carbon capture and storage (ccs); natural gas could be replaced by hydrogen. In the meantime, natural gas would continue to be used as a “bridge fuel” to a future both greener but also, alas, far off.

This presumption is now coming under attack. Innovative entrepreneurs and imaginative incumbents are finding ways to turn electricity into useful forms of heat, from scaled-up heat pumps of the sort used in some houses to space-age containers filled with white-hot molten tin and graphite plumbing.

In general, heat pumps are a lot more energy-efficient than combustion. Systems that store heat for later use, sometimes called “thermal batteries”, can be charged up when electricity is cheap,

The biggest advantage, though, is that when industries use clean electricity they slash their carbon-dioxide emissions.

Pricing carbon emissions from industrial heat would help a phalanx of innovative technologies whose benefits to society are currently unrewarded. It would be bad news for the natural-gas suppliers that dominate the provision of heat. The effect on decarbonisation by way of ccs, either at the plants where heat is used or at the facilities which turn natural gas and steam into hydrogen, is harder to predict.

ccs may, for all that, have a vital role to play, and sincere proponents of its potential should welcome the spur to innovation that increased uptake of electrical options will provide. It seems highly likely that some applications and some forms of industrial cluster will be best served by ccs or hydrogen. Competition is the best way to find out which.