Steel and sweatshirts. Trucks and smartphones. Snickers and\u00a0beer.<\/p>\n
The stuff in modern life requires huge amounts of dirty fossil fuel to make. And lately, that\u2019s been a\u00a0liability for industries battered by the global energy shocks of the 2020s<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2013led 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<\/a>, Asia<\/a>, and beyond.<\/p>\n A new University of Oxford report<\/a> points to a\u00a0solution: Electrify industrial operations. Existing and emerging technologies \u2014 such as huge heat pumps<\/a>, thermal batteries<\/a>, electric-resistance heaters, induction tech, and plasma-based systems \u2014 that are able to run on an increasingly clean grid have vast potential to reduce companies\u2019 fossil-fuel exposure, the report notes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe industries that electrify fastest will stop being victims of the next crisis,\u201d said Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford and co-author of the report. \u200b\u201cEvery unit of fossil fuel eliminated from an industrial process is a\u00a0unit that can no longer be held hostage by a\u00a0pipeline shutdown, a\u00a0strait closure, or a\u00a0price spike.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to mention how decarbonizing industry would also slash planet-warming emissions, clear smoggy skies<\/a>, and save lives<\/a> in communities downwind of factories.<\/p>\n Yet policymakers and factory owners are not acting fast enough, according to Rosenow. \u200b\u201cThere is still a\u00a0perception that industry is too hard to abate, so we can worry about it later,\u201d he\u00a0said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I\u00a0go to meet with policymakers or speak at industry conferences, this [idea] is still fairly widespread,\u201d Rosenow said. \u200b\u201cUntil recently, I\u00a0was under the same impression, because that\u2019s what most people have been saying.\u201d But these fuels aren\u2019t widely available, and combustion still produces negative health effects even when the input isn\u2019t oil or\u00a0gas.<\/p>\n To investigate the extent to which industry can decarbonize using electric power, he and his co-author, Cassandra Etter-Wenzel, a\u00a0researcher at Oxford\u2019s 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\u00a0tax on carbon pollution.<\/p>\n Both datasets led to the same conclusion: Roughly 85% of industrial energy demand could be electrified by 2050 \u2014 and upwards of 90% in the long term \u2014 with existing and emerging electric tech. \u200b\u201cNear complete electrification is technically possible,\u201d Rosenow said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is whether policy moves fast enough to realise it,\u201d Etter-Wenzel said in a\u00a0statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steel and sweatshirts. Trucks and smartphones. Snickers and\u00a0beer. The stuff in modern life requires huge amounts of dirty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":944640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-944639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116535464162772632","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/944640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}