![]() ![]() All this makes industry a bigger source of greenhouse-gas emissions than power generation or transport. A staggering 90% of that heat is made by burning fossil fuels. Such innovations offer a new path to slowing global warming which may in many cases prove quicker and easier than approaches based on CCS and hydrogen.Īccording to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a research body, industry consumes a third of all global energy, with the generation of heat accounting for three-quarters of that. Fortescue, another mining giant, is introducing all-electric excavators and mining lorries, while Spain’s Roca Group recently unveiled the first electric industrial tunnel kiln for ceramics. On February 8th Rio Tinto and BHP, both gargantuan mining firms, announced a joint effort to build Australia’s first electric smelter for iron ore. These firms are not the only recent converts to the electrification of industry. Yet Dr Brudermüller is not alone.īASF has joined a consortium including SABIC, a Saudi chemicals firm, and Linde, a European engineering firm, to develop an electric furnace that can generate heat intense enough for the chemical reactions that are their bread and butter. ![]() Electricity is for houses and light bulbs and maybe even for cars, but not for heavy industries built around burning heroic quantities of fossil fuel. That is why the recent declaration by Martin Brudermüller, the boss of BASF, that “the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries can only be achieved through electrification" sounds, to many ears, like heresy. Those molecules would have to be manufactured, too, in an energy-intensive process. The same conventional wisdom holds that if BASF were to swear off burning molecules of gas to create heat, the obvious green alternative would be to burn hydrogen molecules instead. The path to decarbonisation will come instead from gathering up those molecules and disposing of them underground, a process known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). Conventional wisdom has it that such a firm cannot really hope to lower very much the number of carbon-dioxide molecules it creates in the course of its business. ![]()
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