[Plank] Industrial processes - as I pointed out in my video on the top 20 emitters
-making things like chemicals, materials, steel, and especially cement, will be one of the hardest
areas of the global economy to decarbonize. I was struck by the figure that up to 50 percent of the
energy used in industry is lost as heat. [Orvis] Waste heat recovery is broadly
the category referred to to try and capture that energy. But in industry there's generally energy
that's used to create heat - often steam - for industrial processes, and then energy that's
used to create electricity. And that energy that's used to generate heat, if pipes aren't
insulated for example, or if you build a factory and later on you realize you need to build a new
boiler a new furnace and you build it where you have space available, that might not be right
next to the process where you actually need it. And so you have to take that heat or that energy
and transfer it across the manufacturing complex where you are. Every inch you move that heat you
lose some of it. It's just - even with the best insulation in the world - you're just, it's very
hard to transfer 100% of it. So better designing manufacturing facilities, better insulating.
When electricity is produced, it's actually done by creating steam that then drives a turbine
to generate electricity. But that steam can be captured and used for heating,
though it's often not. So there's lots of ways to improve waste heat use and recovery in industry,
depending on the industry. Some industries are already very efficient at doing this,
but other industries - especially in developing countries - there's a lot of potential for better
design and better capture of that heat. [Plank] Another small thing, but when you
pointed it out in the book it kind of blew my mind, I never even think about motors, in all
these factories, that make an assembly line work. How important it is to have that motor use just
enough power to get the job done and not too much. [Orvis] There's typically been, in recent years,
a lot of industries have moved to variable speed motors, like what you're talking about.
And that's partly due, by the way, to standards in the US, especially
Department of Energy standards, on motors. But in a lot of other regions, and historically,
they've just had fixed speed motors. And so those don't have the ability to ramp up a
ramp down based on what they're actually needed for. It's actually amazing, you wouldn't think
of something as like a small motor being so important, but it's had a huge impact on energy
use in industry. We're starting to see the same thing now, actually surprisingly, in air
conditioning. So for example in China, China is moving towards a variable speed air conditioning
instead of fixed speed air conditioning. But even there the same concept, where if you have
a variable output, you can better match demand to what's actually needed. Whereas if you just
have fixed speed you get that kind of cycling on and off, on and off, on and off that tends
to be more energy consuming and also harder on the grid when you start adding up all those devices.
[Orvis] You did mention china, they are far and away the leading emitter for industrial emissions,
mainly due to the manufacturing that they dominate in. What are they doing to cut those emissions,
besides pushing variable speed motors. [Orvis] So china has one of the most successful
programs in the world to address energy and emissions in industry. It's called the
Top Ten Thousand Program and it's really a bucket of several different policies ranging from
things like worker training, to energy audits and energy reporting. It's amazing when you
require people to report how much energy they're using and where it's coming from,
you help industries identify processes where they're using much more than they
should. And so it ranges all the way from those down to actually energy use
targets for different industries or specific companies and facilities, and that's helped
drive huge reductions in energy use in China's industry sector far exceeding
the initial goals of the program. I think they got 20% over the energy reductions that they
were originally targeting with that program. So providing those technical resources - and
in some cases setting those actual energy use requirements on industries - especially
when you know that other facilities are achieving those goals, is a great way to
drive industry to become more efficient. And then China is also, in the long run, shifting
from more of a heavy manufacturing to a lighter manufacturing - or service - economy, which will
help lower energy use and emissions as well. [Plank] So as the United States has turned to
natural gas instead of coal, methane leaks are a huge problem. How are policymakers
tackling this specific challenge? [Orvis] There are different standards in
different states. The Obama administration had a set of natural gas standards that have since
been scrapped by the Trump administration. But monitoring is a big part of the issue.
There's lots of miles of pipeline and it's challenging, and can be expensive,
for natural gas operators to monitor all of that. But without monitoring, we don't really - it's
very hard - to know the leakage rate and where the leakage is occurring if we don't have a better
understanding of the system, and being able to identify those leaks. So at a minimum we need
better monitoring of the pipeline system, and that covers the entire system all the
way from where the gas is extracted, down to where it goes into people's homes. There's a
fair amount of research on the transmission, or the large-scale natural gas system, there's less
on the distribution system, and there's even less on where the distribution system meets
up with people's homes, what's happening once the gas arrives how much of it is leaking.
And then there's requirements on capturing methane. So a lot of methane is actually
just vented. There's just an article, I think, in the Times this week about even though natural gas
manufacturers and refiners are promising not to do it, there's a ton of methane that's just being
leaked because the other products that they're producing are more valuable. So standards that
require either burning that - because burning it is still not as ideal as capturing it, but methane
is 28 times stronger than CO2 over 100 years and so even just burning it is an improvement
over letting it vent. And there's other things, there's something called green well completions
which make sure that when the wells go in, the gases that come out are captured
and they don't just simply leak. Colorado has been a leader on this and actually
Canada has a set of standards for natural gas extraction that are pretty stringent.
[Plank] Cement is a massive emitter. The whole process is very emission, energy intensive. Are
there policies that have achieved decarbonizing cement even a little bit? I think a little bit
would go a long way given how much it's used. [Orvis] A big one is something called cement
clinker substitution, which basically means--the cement process involves breaking down some inputs
into material that can then be used as cement. But you can replace some of that from other sources
such as ash or gypsum, not that we want to promote the use of coal, but coal ash is often used as an
input to cement manufacturing as a substitute. So there are a fair amount of substitute materials
that you can use. Now you can't fully replace what's in cement, and there are trade-offs
between substituting in those materials and other properties of cement, but provided it
meets certain criteria, you can increase the share of cement that's coming from those materials and
therefore avoid the process - the chemical process - by which you have to make the clinker. I think
some industries are looking at alternatives for the energy used to create the cement. So exploring
whether or not they can use indirect heat from electricity would be a big one, reducing the
demand for cement actually is another big one. So buildings in the US last 50, 80, 100 years.
Buildings on average in China last 20 years. And so every 20 years that building has to be replaced
with new cement. And that's from a mixture of building codes, sometimes the quality of the
materials - the steel or the cement - used is not high quality, and that causes the building to kind
of crumble. In the long run cement is actually a good industry to target for carbon capture because
that process of turning the inputs into clinker that's used for cement, that actually produces CO2
as a pretty pure by-product and so if you can just capture that in storage, you don't have to deal as
much with separating it, which is one of the big costs of carbon capture. My hope is that in the
long run that might be a good - cement might be a good - candidate for carbon capture. There's an
emerging group of people who think that something called cross-laminated timber, which is a new
way of reforming wood products that makes them have almost the same strength as cement, that
that's a hopeful potential avenue, but it's it's still emerging and it's not clear yet how large of
the market for buildings can be met by that. [Plank] The full length hour-long version of
this interview is available to members of my new video on demand offering TDC.video
If you found this interesting you should definitely check that out. A premium membership
not only gets you access to every full-length episode of the Climate Change Solution Show,
you help support this project and its goal of bringing these solutions to the attention of as
many people as possible. Plus, you get access to my research links from each episode of this show
to help you efficiently dig much deeper into these solutions on your own.
Until next time, for TDC, I'm Bryce Plank, thanks for watching.