Steel and sweatshirts. Trucks and smartphones. Snickers and beer.
The stuff in modern life requires huge amounts of dirty fossil fuel to make. And lately, that’s been a liability for industries battered by the global energy shocks of the 2020s.
First, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spiked liquefied natural gas prices, affecting manufacturers around the world and even forcing factory shutdowns in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In recent weeks, the U.S.-Israel–led war in Iran has choked the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up costs yet again for plants in Europe, Asia, and beyond.
A new University of Oxford report points to a solution: Electrify industrial operations. Existing and emerging technologies — such as huge heat pumps, thermal batteries, electric-resistance heaters, induction tech, and plasma-based systems — that are able to run on an increasingly clean grid have vast potential to reduce companies’ fossil-fuel exposure, the report notes.
“The industries that electrify fastest will stop being victims of the next crisis,” said Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford and co-author of the report. “Every unit of fossil fuel eliminated from an industrial process is a unit that can no longer be held hostage by a pipeline shutdown, a strait closure, or a price spike.”
That’s not to mention how decarbonizing industry would also slash planet-warming emissions, clear smoggy skies, and save lives in communities downwind of factories.
Yet policymakers and factory owners are not acting fast enough, according to Rosenow. “There is still a perception that industry is too hard to abate, so we can worry about it later,” he said.
“When I go to meet with policymakers or speak at industry conferences, this [idea] is still fairly widespread,” Rosenow said. “Until recently, I was under the same impression, because that’s what most people have been saying.” But these fuels aren’t widely available, and combustion still produces negative health effects even when the input isn’t oil or gas.
To investigate the extent to which industry can decarbonize using electric power, he and his co-author, Cassandra Etter-Wenzel, a researcher at Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, analyzed two lines of evidence: detailed technical studies on the potential to electrify industrial processes and more than 1,600 publicly available global decarbonization scenarios. These possible paths provide minimum-cost estimates of how quickly industrial subsectors can electrify given favorable policies, like a tax on carbon pollution.
Both datasets led to the same conclusion: Roughly 85% of industrial energy demand could be electrified by 2050 — and upwards of 90% in the long term — with existing and emerging electric tech. “Near complete electrification is technically possible,” Rosenow said.
“The question is whether policy moves fast enough to realise it,” Etter-Wenzel said in a statement.