Industrial clusters for deep decarbonisation

Perhaps no sector of the global economy needs a concerted effort towards deeper decarbonisation than industry, which includes energy-intensive sectors such as chemicals, iron and steel, cement and aluminum. .

However, industry has long been considered difficult to decarbonize and is mostly protected from strong energy and climate policy about concerns about job loss, national competitiveness and carbon leakage.

Professor Frank Geels has published a new paper in Science with co-authors Benjamin Sovacool and Marfurga Iskandarova titled “Industrial clusters for deep decarbonisation: Net-zero megaprojects in the UK offer promise and lessons.”

Industrial decarbonization scenarios typically define carbon capture and storage (CCS) and fuel-to-hydrogen conversion are potential options for real value, but these technologies are expensive for individual companies and specific industries.

These options may become more feasible when implemented in industrial clusters, where factories from various industries active in close. We see promise and lessons in recent advances in the co-development of networkless cluster planning, policy enforcement and engineering developments in the UK, where plans and designs The world’s leading companies have come close to the implementation stage.