Members of both parties are aiming to help reduce carbon emissions that result from the manufacturing of products like steel, cement, and iron — one of the most challenging but overlooked components of combating climate change.
Technologies exist to “decarbonize” the power, transportation, and building sectors with renewable electricity, electric vehicles, and energy efficiency. But that is largely not true for industrial manufacturing, which is responsible for about 22% of U.S. emissions.
“Out of the major energy sectors, heavy industry is the hardest to decarbonize,” said Julio Friedmann, a senior research Scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “Even though it’s an enormous fraction of carbon emissions, it’s a huge step away from the public so they don’t see it or know how it works.”
The high rate of emissions of industrial manufacturing is a major problem for proposals like the Green New Deal that would fund a significant build-out of new clean energy infrastructure and climate change resiliency projects, such as seawalls and levees, that require carbon-intensive materials.
“A Green New Deal idea is that we spend a lot of government money and build a lot of super green stuff,” Friedmann said. “If you don’t take care of the industrial sector, that stuff increases your emissions.”
The main problem is the chemical processes of producing steel, cement, and iron inherently require the use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and there are few substitutes that would work the same way.
“Any scenario where we get to zero carbon has to grapple with the fact that we don’t know how to make steel, cement, and fertilizer without carbon as a chemical input and it’s been historically under-researched,” Democratic Representative Sean Casten of Illinois told the Washington Examiner. “We live in a world where the quality of life we have requires not just access to energy, but access to things like steel, cement, and fertilizer. How do we figure out how to sustain our quality of life without using that carbon input?”
Casten is a co-author of bipartisan legislation introduced in the House and Senate in July, the Clean Industrial Technology Act, that would create a new program within the Energy Department to research and develop technologies that could be used as non-carbon alternatives in industrial manufacturing processes.
Casten, a freshman, was a clean energy businessman who led companies that aimed to help manufacturers cut their greenhouse gas emissions. As an example of the challenge, he cites experience working on a project at a silicon plant in West Virginia. Carbon-emitting coal is a critical part of the chemical process of creaking silicon, which is used to make solar panels.
“There is no way to produce silicon right now without a coal input, which means we don’t really know how to make solar without coal,” Casten said.
Another challenge is that manufacturers generate additional emissions from the electricity consumed in order to power large facilities, many of which have long lifespans, including steel plants built in the 1930s, Friedmann says.
Powering a cement kiln or a blast furnace requires enormous amounts of high temperature heat, meaning it’s more difficult to switch to all renewable or zero-carbon fuels.
If you combine the indirect emissions from power used by facilities with the emissions inherent in the chemical makeup of a product, the industrial sector is the largest emitting sector in the U.S. economy, at 30%.
The technology for capturing carbon directly from an industrial facility so that it is never released into the atmosphere is also less advanced than the kind that can remove carbon dioxide from a coal or natural gas plant’s exhaust.
Brad Crabtree, co-director of the Carbon Capture coalition, a group of environmental and business groups that hosted a July 18 congressional briefing on industrial emissions, said there are no large-scale carbon capture projects operating in the U.S. for any of the three highest emitting industrial sectors: steel, cement, and chemicals.
“If we are to meet our climate change goals, we need a critical mass of carbon capture technologies in these sectors by 2030,” Crabtree said.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who co-authored the Senate version of the Clean Industrial Technology Act, said he expects the legislation to prompt more research into carbon capture for industrial use.
“We expect carbon capture will be a significant piece of this,” Whitehouse told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Businesses and industry groups are supportive of finding ways to lower their carbon output, including through carbon capture, mainly for economic reasons.
The Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and American Chemistry Council all have endorsed the Clean Industrial Technology Act.
Whitehouse, one of the loudest critics of industry groups, says the Chamber and NAM’s support for his bill fits into those groups’ recent shift in messaging on climate change, in which they frame the issue as a problem that is better solved with federal spending on clean energy research and development than regulations or carbon taxes.
“I see this as a fairly significant opening effort so that when we finally do get a proper price on carbon, these companies don’t have to go to the drawing board to figure out what works, but they have technological solutions that are available to respond to the economic signal,” Whitehouse said. “This gives them the chance to signal to its members we are not awful everywhere. I applaud their support of this.”
Stephen Holt, an environmental and safety official at Giant Cement Company, told attendees at the July congressional briefing that his company is interested in reducing its carbon footprint, and supports federal government efforts to help.
Cement is an essential ingredient in producing concrete, the most used building material in the world, Holt noted.
While the power used to run cement plants has traditionally been provided by coal, some of his company’s facilities are in the process of switching off coal to natural gas and other alternative fuels. That transition still “has a ways to go,” Holt added.
