Day 12: Industry

Today you will learn from expert guest Max Åhman about the industry sector, why it contributes to climate change, and how eliminate or mitigate the problems of the industry sector to solve climate change.

Summary

Guest: Max Åhman

Max Åhman worked as a researcher, civil servant and international consultant within the field of energy and climate since 1998. Max's PhD thesis in 2003 was a technology assessment of future alternative powertrains (Hybrid, Fuel cell and electric vehicles). After his thesis, his worked expanded towards analyzing the development of biofuels and also towards the complexity of industry, climate policy and innovation polices. He left Lund and the university in 2006 and continued his career as an international consultant and part time researcher (in Nairobi and in Tunis ) and as a civil servant at the Climate Policy unit at the Swedish EPA. He has since august 2012 returned to Lund university as a full time researcher. His main areas of research now is analyzing the evolving long-term changes induced by climate policy on the energy, industry and transport sectors.

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Explain succinctly what the industry sector is from first principles.

Energy intensive industry consumes around 30 percent of global energy use.  But the climate effect does not only come from combusting fossil fuels or fossil feedstock, but it also comes from the process itself, like turning limestone into clinker for cement production or using coke in iron and steel production as a reduction agent. Or, even the worst case, of using fossil fuels as a feedstock for producing plastics and other chemicals.

We have to separate the manufacturing industry from the energy intensive industry, or what we might call the heavy industry. The heavy industry produces basic materials like steel, cement, aluminum, and all other things that we need in our daily lives. These materials are also a necessity in the future if we're supposed to build a low carbon world.

Why is the industry sector a problem for climate change?

One problem with the energy intensive industry is the way it works. It is very embedded into the use of fossil fuels. The process in itself is built around fossil fuels.

Another problem from a climate policy perspective is that the added value of producing these needed basic materials is quite low compared to the products that it actually end up in. Meaning there is few incentives or very sort of tight margins in within the industry in itself to accept higher costs, unless there is a very high carbon price.

Why is the industry sector important to address? What's at stake if we don't address it?

Well, there are several reasons why we need to address the climate effects from the heavy industry:

• Zero Emissions: Reaching zero emission industries by 2050.  That is not very far away in the future for a heavy industry that usually have lead times around 20 years or even longer between major renovations.
• Pollution: These industries are also heavy air pollutants and also heavy wastewater pollutants.
• Asset loss: Investments now in fossil structures in fossil industry may  make them obsolete. Basically, we will lose a lot of valuable assets that we should have redirected financial flows from way earlier.
• Communities: Industry needs to transform in order also to save the communities they're serving because there's usually are quite well embedded into the very fabric of these countries are, cities where they actually are working.

How might we mitigate or eliminate some of the problems of industry to climate change?

First is always to look at energy efficiency. All assessments point that usually 20 to 30 percent more energy efficient is easily to achieve within the coming 10 years. But that is not enough, not by far. We need to reach zero.

Second we need to change the very core processes of these industries:

• The steel industry is spearheading this development now, and it's going quite rapidly. Instead of using the fossil coal to produce coke, they use hydrogen to reduce the iron ore to iron.
• Cement is exploring CCS, carbon capture and storage. Which might be a necessity since the CO2 emissions comes  to around half of it comes from the lime.
• The worst case is actually the petrochemical industry, since there the fossil fuel oil in this case is actually embedded in the product in itself. But this can also be changed by using captured carbon and using Hydrogen. You can produce chemicals that way. You can also produce biomass or we need to take care that biomass is a limited resource and should be used only where it's actually really necessary to use.

Lastly, we need and we must also address material efficiency and sufficiency in society.

• We also might eventually ask ourselves, how much stuff do we actually need?

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Additional Resources

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Green Steel Tracker
• Global Energy Monitor
• An industrial policy framework for transforming energy and emissions intensive industries towards zero emissions

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Top Skills To Learn

Our guest recommends learning the following skills:

• Engineering and systemic system analysis: understand how the industry works, how big it is, and what it actually is done. That doesn't mean you have to be a metallurgist or petrochemicalist.  You just need to understand roughly how big it is, how long lead times there are, and where they're located, and how they actually operate.    
• Global perspective: materials are traded globally and this transition that is coming will have an effect on trade, will have an effect on competitive advantages of countries. And we need to understand this better if we're supposed to do it in a fair and respectable way.
• Life cycle analysis: beware that even if we manage to reduce emissions to zero for these industries, they will require a lot of energy anyway, and they were that will in itself create new problems that needs to be dealt with  and will also be able to produce a lot of justice concerns globally that also need to be dealt with.

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Activity

Activity: Industry Carbon Emissions Research

Description: Choose a specific industry (e.g., manufacturing, agriculture) and research its major sources of carbon emissions. Identify key processes or technologies contributing to these emissions. Reflect on the scale of impact and potential strategies for reducing emissions in that industry.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.