Why Decarbonizing Industry Can’t Wait
Photo: Jung Getty
A year ago, global carbon emissions were in a steep decline as pandemic-related shutdowns gummed up the wheels of commerce. After ticking back up as lockdowns lifted, the year ended with a 6.4 percent emissions cut, globally, and a bigger dip in the United States: down 12.9 percent, or nearly 650 million tonnes, according to Carbon Monitor.
Putting aside the massive societal trauma and costs that accompanied this dip, there is the fact that even if we sustain it beyond the pandemic, this global emissions decrease would be insufficient to reach the goals set by the Paris climate agreement. To keep from exceeding a 1.5 ºC temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, we need to cut global emissions 7.6 percent per year by 2030.
In the U.S., our 2020 emissions diet was due not to systemic action toward that climate goal but rather to the fact that we didn’t leave our houses much. By May, monthly passenger vehicle miles and jet fuel demand had dropped by 40 and 68 percent, respectively, from 2019 levels. Transportation sector emissions are already surging back up, highlighting the need for permanent carbon reductions across our physical infrastructure and industrial markets. Fortunately, many of our cohort companies are creating pathways to decarbonize industry for the long haul.
As Cohort 2019 fellow and Brimstone Energy CEO Cody Finke details in his advice to clean industry entrepreneurs, decarbonizing industry is an especially vexing task for many reasons. It will require not just inventing new approaches to making the products responsible for half of all industrial emissions—cement, steel, hydrogen, and aluminum—but also making those approaches both cleaner and cheaper.
Plus, not all of the environmental impacts wrought by industry rise from smokestacks: process emissions based on chemistry rather than combustion account for 22 percent of industrial emissions. Cement is the leading source of those non-combustion emissions, making it responsible for eight percent of total global CO₂ emissions. It’s also the product that both Finke, through his startup Brimstone Energy, and Cohort 2020 fellow Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems, are decarbonizing.
Sublime Systems research scientist Mariya Layurova. Photo: Matt Andrew
In the past year and despite the global pandemic, Sublime Systems spun out of MIT, grew its team to five, and increased the production rate of its Sublime Lime™, a carbon-neutral version of the key ingredient in cement, from grams- to kg-per-hour. For Ellis, this increased production is an important milestone because it allows customers to sample Sublime Lime™, which lowers the CO₂ footprint of their cement without compromising its performance. “This step brings Sublime closer to our goal of producing carbon-neutral cement at a million tons-per-year scale,” says Ellis. “That’s the rate of today’s polluting cement kilns, which are chiefly responsible for cement’s massive carbon footprint.”
Synthesized ammonia (mostly for nitrogen fertilizer) is another industrial commodity with a huge impact. The fossil-fueled Haber-Bosch manufacturing process generates 1.6 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. But Nitricity (Cohort 2020, Joshua McEnaney, Jay Schwalbe) has a new path to producing nitrogen fertilizer: on farms, using just air, water, and solar energy. At scale, Nitricity could mitigate more than 10 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Ensuring that agricultural products are safely stored and transported requires another infrastructure element ripe for innovation: Industrial refrigeration systems. Nelumbo (Cohort 2017, Lance Brockway, David Walther) develops advanced materials and surface modifications. With support from the California Energy Commission, Nelumbo is improving the performance and extending the life of heat exchanger coils. Making them resistant to ice and frost cuts the need for energy-intensive defrost cycles, which accounts for over 20 percent of the energy that refrigeration systems use.
In the U.S., industry consumes 12 percent of all energy in the act of separating chemicals from one another. Using advances in materials science, startups are cutting those emissions and creating opportunities to recapture industrial wastes, including carbon dioxide. Mosaic Materials (Cohort 2015, Thomas McDonald) and SiTration (Cohort 2020, Brendan Smith) are bringing new separations solutions to market across industries, creating opportunities to build circularity into industrial manufacturing.
Opus 12 (Cohort 2015, Etosha Cave, Kendra Kuhl) is doing similar work. Its device bolts onto any source of CO₂ emissions and, using only water and electricity as inputs, recycles the gas into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels. Its mission is to reduce the world's heaviest emitters' carbon footprint while creating a new revenue stream from what is discarded today as a waste product. In 2020, Opus 12 unveiled the world’s first car part made from recycled CO₂ with Mercedes-Benz. It will ship CO₂-neutral jet fuel to the U.S. Air Force this year, and in mid-March, Procter & Gamble announced a partnership with Opus 12 to produce carbon-negative ingredients for Tide detergent.
Decarbonizing industry also requires creating wholly new manufacturing approaches, such as the additive manufacturing platforms from Elmworks (Cohort 2020, Sam Calisch) and polySpectra (Cohort 2015, Raymond Weitekamp), and new types of materials, such as Mallinda’s (Cohort 2017, Chris Kaffer, Philip Taynton) vitrimer matrix composites for the circular economy. ReSource Chemical, (Cohort 2020, Aanindeeta Banerjee) is on a mission to make plastic from waste CO₂ and inedible biomass.
Ecosystem Support
The Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) supports nearly all of the fellows mentioned above, either directly, though fellowship funding, or via follow-on funding through grants. “It’s critical that we decarbonize all parts of the U.S. economy,” says Joe Cresko, AMO’s chief engineer. “But the industrial sector, which is linked to nearly a third of all emissions, is particularly difficult to decarbonize.”
AMO has focused on industrial decarbonization since 2015, with the release of the DOE’s Quadrennial Technology Review.
"We look at all the levers to allow manufacturers to be more sustainable and to put U.S. manufacturing in a more competitive position globally," says Cresko. "That means improving carbon intensity, materials efficiency, energy efficiency, and looking at all of the phases of industrial products' lifecycle and their net impacts, which has led AMO to invest in circular economy approaches."
AMO funds our Berkeley Lab partner division Cyclotron Road—not to mention DOE’s other Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) nodes—as a way to leverage its resources and support the development and application of new technology for the industrial sector. These support programs then feed into the country’s burgeoning innovation ecosystem—an ecosystem that is experiencing favorable tailwinds right now from the public and private sectors.
President Biden’s infrastructure plan would invest $40 billion in improving research infrastructure and laboratories, with half directed at historically black colleges and universities—which are just three percent of U.S. colleges and universities but graduate 24 percent of Black students in STEM.
The plan also puts $50 million toward the National Science Foundation, advancing new technology in otherwise conservative and commodity industries.
And investment in technology aimed at decarbonization (more generally, clean tech 2.0) is brisk and appears to be getting brisker, especially given the rise in special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deals focused on clean tech.
Marquee investments from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is betting on startups that want to decarbonize industrial commodities and the energy sector, get a lot of attention. But Sophie Purdom, co-founder of Climate Tech VC, which publishes a weekly newsletter, says interest is high across the investor community.
“Everyone is incentivized by something different. BEV is looking for moonshots. Corporate VCs are trying to acquire innovation. There are specialist industrial VCs that exist to invest in decarbonization, but inherently have smaller funds, so are threading the needle while trying to make a profit,” she says. Purdom is also part of that specialist VC community, as she is in the process of launching a climate-focused fund. “And then the generalist VCs are climate-curious and trying to penetrate the market. The cool part is that right now everyone is working together.”
As Purdom noted in the Financial Times, interest in decarbonizing industry—not to mention transportation, agriculture, and buildings—is tied to the fact that climate change is visceral. “We feel climate personally now,” she told the paper. “Corporates feel it. The economy feels it.”
Even for the millions of Americans who helped drop 2020 emissions by spending most of the year inside, at home, the changing climate is hard to ignore.