The Biden administration plans to spend up to $6 billion on new technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industries such as steel, cement, chemicals and aluminum, which are huge contributors to global warming, but have so far been extremely difficult to clean.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Monday that her agency will partially fund 33 different projects in 20 states to test methods to limit emissions from a wide variety of factories and industrial facilities, calling it “the largest investment in industrial carbonization in the U.S. history”.
Constellium, an aluminum producer, will receive up to $75 million to build a first-of-its-kind aluminum casting plant in Ravenswood, W.Va., that can run on hydrogen fuel rather than natural gas.
Kraft Heinz, a food maker, will receive up to $170.9 million to install electric boilers and heat pumps at 10 facilities across the country, where they will be used to produce the large amounts of heat needed for things like drying spaghetti without direct combustion of fossil fuels.
Cleveland-Cliffs, a steelmaker, would get up to $500 million to help retire a large coal-burning blast furnace in Middletown, Ohio, and replace it with two furnaces that use electricity to turn scrap into steel. The company will also test ways to produce steel using hydrogen.
Although the projects themselves would put a relatively small dent in U.S. emissions, Ms. Granholm said the goal was to demonstrate new technologies that can be scaled up quickly and “set a new gold standard for clean generation in the United States and across the world”.
Heavy industry is one of the country’s biggest sources of global warming pollution, accounting for about a quarter of all emissions. Many factories burn coal or natural gas to generate the heat needed to create steam, glass, or turn iron into steel. Cement manufacturers emit carbon dioxide as part of the process of turning limestone into cement. Chemical producers use oil and gas as raw materials for their products.
In theory, there are technologies that can reduce emissions. Industrial heat pumps or thermal batteries could help factories generate heat from renewable electricity. Cement manufacturers could capture and bury the carbon dioxide. Steel makers could use pure hydrogen instead of carbon. But many of these solutions are expensive and in their infancy.
“It’s different from the electricity sector, where widely available alternatives to fossil fuels like wind, solar and batteries have come down dramatically in cost,” Morgan Bazilian, a professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines. “With the industry, we have yet to see clear winners emerge at the price required.”
Policymakers are also reluctant to crack down on industrial emissions for fear that factories and jobs could move overseas to places with looser environmental rules.
While the Biden administration has announced strict limits on carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and power plants, it has so far avoided similar regulations for industrial sectors such as steel or cement. Instead, the administration has focused on funding new technologies in the hopes that they will become cheaper and widely adopted.
Separately, various federal agencies have announced plans to buy steel, cement, asphalt and glass made with cleaner processes in an effort to create a market for low-carbon industrial materials.
Money for the projects in Monday’s announcement comes from the Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstration Program, which was funded by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The 33 projects selected will have to undergo further negotiations with the agency before receiving final funding.
One is Sublime Systems, a startup exploring cleaner ways to produce cement. Traditionally, cement manufacturers burn large amounts of coal or gas to create temperatures above 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, which turns limestone into lime and releases carbon dioxide as part of the chemical conversion.
Instead, Sublime uses a process powered entirely by electricity that doesn’t require high heat or the release of carbon dioxide. The company has tested its technology in a small pilot facility, and an award from the Department of Energy, worth up to $87 million, would help the company build its first commercial plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
This funding is invaluable, said Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime. Many new technologies to reduce industrial emissions “are too expensive for traditional capitalists and too risky for conventional project financiers,” he said. Having the Energy Department share the cost of early projects “accelerates the expansion of these technologies that must be developed and deployed globally as quickly as possible” to combat climate change.
The Energy Department could also fund several projects that use an emerging technology called thermal energy storage, which can take intermittent electricity from wind or solar farms to gradually heat bricks or other materials, which can then be used for the production of constant heat for industrial processes.
“The area that is often written off as the hardest to decarbonize is the industrial sector,” said Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s national climate adviser. But, he added, “these projects are such a good example of the range and diversity of technologies that we can develop to do this decarbonization work.”
