That was one of the takeaways from a panel Wednesday that was part of a series on the Corporate Knights Earth Index. The initiative tracks Canada’s progress on decarbonizing its economy in a variety of carbon-intensive sectors, from buildings and transportation to agriculture and power. Heavy industry – the manufacturing of cement, steel, chemicals, pulp and paper, and non-ferrous metal smelting and refining – has seen only a slight reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, according to Corporate Knights analysis, something that will need to change for the country to reach its climate ambition.

Heavy industry’s contribution to Canada’s GDP is 2%, but it is responsible for 9% of the country’s emissions. And to meet Canada’s commitment to cut emissions from 2005 levels by 45% by 2030, these industries would have to decline at an average rate of just over 4% a year. Lowering these emissions will not be easy without a complete rethink of these industries’ processes, said Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights. “Incrementalism is not going to be an effective strategy in this case,” he told the panel. 

This is because roughly half of these industries’ greenhouse gas emissions come from the chemical processes they use to manufacture products. So it isn’t simply a matter of electrifying their energy consumption. A larger, more complex transformation has to happen. Recycling and disruptive technologies will be key in that transition, said Torrie, but most important will be speed.

By taking bitumen and converting it to carbon fibre alone, it will add so much value to our economy. And it will transform our economy, not transition it.

—Laura Kilcrease, CEO of Alberta Innovates

When it comes to cement, Chris Bataille, an energy economist with the Paris-based think tank Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations and a professor at Simon Fraser University, said a big chunk of emissions can be eliminated through better design that minimizes the amount of cement used in buildings. But carbon capture technology will also be necessary to reduce emissions, he said.

In Edmonton, a pilot project is under development at a Lehigh Cement plant that hopes to capture more than 90% of the carbon dioxide that comes from the facility’s flue gas. The project is a first for the North American cement industry and follows a Norwegian carbon-capture cement project being built in Brevik, Norway, by HeidelbergCement.

Panellists also exalted the potential of research exploring “bitumen beyond combustion,” which entails tapping Canada’s bitumen deposits to make useful materials beyond oil and gas, such as carbon fibre (a strong, lightweight material used in some electric cars). Laura Kilcrease, the CEO of Alberta Innovates (which funded a $15-million competition to further develop this technology), says that this is not only an alternative way to use an abundant Canadian resource, but an important avenue for increasing its value. “By taking bitumen and converting it to carbon fibre alone, it will add so much value to our economy. And it will transform our economy, not transition it,” she said. 

Panellists agreed we’ll need a national conversation about how these critical industries make the necessary changes to arrive in a net-zero future. And a large part of that conversation will need to involve Indigenous communities, said Jean Paul Gladu, a founder and principal at Mokwateh Group who serves on Suncor’s board of directors. Gladu said that we won’t be able to achieve our goals without Indigenous consent.

And just as there is little time for incrementalism when it comes to the climate crisis, Gladu said that the same applies to Canada’s relationships with its Indigenous Peoples. “We’ve got to start thinking bigger in this country,” he said. 

The post How to transform Canada’s heavy industry into a net-zero powerhouse appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s a similar science that Bataille, an energy economist and economic modeller, has been using for more than 20 years to show the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions on people and the planet.

While his and other climate models haven’t received near the widespread global attention as pandemic-tracking charts used to urge citizens to help “flatten the curve” of the virus, Bataille is hopeful that information will help people take this type of science more seriously.

“Suddenly modelling is relevant to them, numbers are relevant to them, and the credibility of the experts is relevant,” says Bataille, a Vancouver-based energy policy consultant and researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, a non-profit research centre headquartered in Paris.

And while it’s an inexact science, Bataille says modelling can provide much-needed direction in times of uncertainty, especially when well communicated to the public.

“People know they need to do something different, so they are looking for direction,” says Bataille, who is also an adjunct professor at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU). “What I am seeing is that, if experts communicate what they know and don’t know and provide clear direction given this uncertainty, and are willing to correct themselves, people will listen.”

It’s not just wishful thinking for Bataille, a key figure in the movement to decarbonize heavy industry, in particular steel – a sector whose emissions, together with concrete, are responsible for 14.7% of global CO2 emissions.

Bataille’s work is slowly but steadily helping the steel sector build a path toward a net-zero carbon future.

Bataille, a 47-year-old married father of two young daughters, first became interested in modelling as an economics and political science student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. One of his UBC professors was renowned economist John Helliwell, whose letter of recommendation landed Bataille a spot in the master’s program in resource and environmental management at SFU.

Bataille worked and studied with Mark Jaccard, a professor with a specialty in developing energy-economy models that assess the effectiveness of sustainable energy and climate policies. Jaccard ran (and still runs) an energy material modelling group at SFU, which also houses the Canadian Energy and Emissions Data Centre.

Bataille says the team built models of the Canadian economy, showing the potential for reducing emissions. “It was a hotbed of energy and economy modelling, and still is,” he says. “A lot of the people who do this in Canada now all came from this group and this school.”

Bataille became the executive director of MK Jaccard & Associates, a spin-off of his work with the professor at SFU from 2006 to 2011, before co-founding Navius Research Inc., where he worked for four years before going out on his own, with a focus on modelling for heavy industry, in particular steel and cement.

Jaccard describes Bataille as “very talented as a modeller” and a “quick study” who has become “a high international roller” when it comes to energy modelling for policy analysis. “He’s a very good, hard-nosed critical thinker,” says Jaccard, adding that Bataille is also skilled at bridging the nexus between academia, government and non-governmental organizations.

Shahrzad Rahbar, president of the Ottawa-based Industrial Gas Users Association, tasked Bataille with four different projects in different roles she’s held over the past couple of decades. She describes him as an “honest researcher” with a “fiercely analytical” mind.

Rahbar hopes Bataille’s work will inspire industry and policy-makers in Canada to put a greater emphasis on decarbonization moving forward.

“I think Canada’s missed opportunity is an international leadership role in the industrial piece of the puzzle when it comes to carbon reduction,” she says.

“As Chris’s work gets more international recognition, I hope that there will be more of a Canadian appetite for looking at the industrial piece in the same manner [as they do internationally] and attempts to craft a viable transition plan.”

If Bataille could set Canada’s strategy for decarbonizing steel during this time of once-in-a-generation public investment, he would get the federal government (and high-carbon manufacturers) to commit to using greener steel and build supply through accelerated research and development, piloting, commercialization and guaranteed lead markets at higher prices for set amounts of greener steel. For a few billion dollars spread over a decade or so, he says, we could make hydrogen-reduced ore in northern Quebec and ship the reduced iron to electric-arc furnaces in Ontario, where it could be made into steel.

Bataille says it was the initial work with Rahbar that enabled him to go out on his own to pursue his “obsession” with industrial decarbonization. That led to his various research papers, talks, policy influence work and work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Some of his work includes being lead editor of a special issue of Climate Policy on the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) in 2015/16 and a two-year project to review technology and policy options for net-zero emission decarbonization of heavy industry, including detailed physical and policy transition plans for the Canadian steel, chemicals, mining and forest products sectors. Bataille says the policy package written for the 2014/15 DDPP helped inform Alberta’s climate plan under then-Premier Rachel Notley, which helped them form the template of the federal climate plan.

He’s also a lead author for the industry chapter of the sixth cycle of the IPCC Assessment Report (2019 to 2021).

Bataille sees his mission as normalizing conversations about industrial decarbonization, making it part of forecasts such as the one announced in March by the Canadian Steel Producers Association to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

“The net-zero commitment from the federal government on down is a necessary beginning. It [requires] a huge jump in technology, and we aren’t going to incrementally bumble our way there,” he says.

It’s his ability to work on different sides of the debate, including industry and academics, that Bataille believes enables him to break through barriers.

“I’m a hybrid academic and corporate person,” he says. “On one hand, I get what it means to run a business, to have things go really well, then south when you’ve got people on payroll . . . Then, on a deep level, I’m a researcher. I’m a person always trying to look forward and explore the world ahead of us . . . [Having experience with both] allows me to realize what policies are likely to have traction and not have traction because of the stickiness of reality.”

Despite pilot projects like the Swedish HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), described as “the world’s first fossil-free steelmaking technology,” overall progress on decarbonization has been slow. Nonetheless, Bataille believes his work is helping drive change long-term.

“I would like to see HYBRIT’s hydrogen DRI iron ore reduction technology, or something like it, become the new standard for making steel in my lifetime.”

It’s that hope that inspires him to press on.

“People need a purpose in their lives, and for me it’s an endless font of purpose. It’s not going to be solved when I’m done working, but it’s work worth doing.”

Brenda Bouw is a freelance writer  and editor based in Vancouver.

The post Man of steel: Decarbonizing one of the most carbon-heavy materials on the planet appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In an online roundtable Wednesday, policy experts said that even “smokestack industries” in Canada can become low-carbon sectors using existing technology. To make the transition, however, they’ll require government subsidies.

Manufacturers generate more than 10% of the country’s gross domestic product, export more than $354 billion in goods annually, and employ 1.7 million Canadians. Energy-intensive heavy industry – including steel, cement, pulp and paper, and chemicals – accounts for 85% of the sector’s emissions.

Many manufacturers have responded to the COVID-19 crisis by retooling their operations to produce much-needed personal protective equipment – an indication of their ability to adapt to national imperatives, said Ralph Torrie, who co-authored an analysis on the manufacturing sector’s climate change challenges.

“We see the extent to which industry in general can quickly pivot when there is an urgent need or high motivation,” Torrie said at a session hosted by Corporate Knights as part of its seven-part Building Back Better event series.

“We tend to forget about that in the business-as-usual environment – how capable we are of change when we need to.”

In the analysis, the authors propose $5 billion in federal spending over the next decade to purchase emission reductions from the steel and cement industries. Such a program would unlock $37 billion in private-sector spending, generate the equivalent of 24,000 full-time jobs annually and reduce emissions by eight million tonnes per year by 2030, according to analysis by Torrie and Chris Bataille, a researcher at the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI).

It would also put the steel and cement sectors on track to achieve net-zero emissions in their operations by 2050 if they employ carbon capture technology. The Canadian Steel Producers Association recently committed to a “net-zero by 2050” target.

Bataille said cement and steel are among the most commonly used commodities in the global economy. They’re also among the most greenhouse-gas (GHG) intensive, since both rely heavily on fossil fuels such as coking coal in their manufacture.

To achieve deep decarbonization, government will have to subsidize the cement sector’s emission reductions since current carbon prices are not high enough to encourage the required investment, said Kent Stuehmer, vice president for cement operations at Lehigh Hanson Canada. He said governments at all levels should incorporate climate strategies into their procurement policies to provide a market for low-carbon cement and other industrial commodities.

Lehigh Hanson is currently in the planning stages to build the world’s first carbon-neutral cement plant in Canada but will need government support to do so, Stuehmer said.

Canada’s steelmakers already have among the world’s lowest emissions per tonne of steel produced and are aiming to do more, said Mark Rowlinson, of the United Steelworkers union and president of Blue Green Canada. But the market currently provides no reward to low-emission producers, he said. At the same time, there is a global glut of steelmaking capacity, driven in part by Chinese plants that have high emissions per tonne.

It’s a similar story for aluminum; Canada has the lowest-GHG aluminum in the world but gains no market advantage as a result of those green credentials. Rowlinson said governments should ensure that low-carbon steel and aluminum are used for public projects like bridges, buildings and public transit vehicles.

Nick Xenos, who leads the Greening Government program at the federal Treasury Board, said Ottawa is working on its procurement policies and has targets for green buildings, zero- or low-emission vehicles and the use of renewable electricity in its operations. However, he said there is a “big data gap” when it comes to assessing the carbon footprint of various construction materials, and the government has asked the National Research Council to create a database through which the performance of prospective suppliers can be accurately assessed.

Smaller manufacturers, meanwhile, are facing increasing efforts to improve material recycling, a move that would reduce waste and lower the GHG intensity of their supply chains. The effort is hampered by the fact that waste disposal remains inexpensive in Canada, especially when compared to enhanced recycling systems, said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario.

She argued that governments – and municipalities in particular – need to set clear and ambitious requirements for recycled content in their procurement policies. That includes proper scoring and verification.

The roundtable’s moderator, Diana Fox Carney, noted that there are important gender aspects to the call for government support in the male-dominated manufacturing sector. To date, women have been hit hardest by pandemic-related job losses due to the closure of restaurants, retail outlets and education and daycare services.

Rowlinson suggested there might be a second round of employment cuts that would hit manufacturers if the economic shutdown continues and noted that his sector is seeing more and more women enter its workforce.

Shawn McCarthy writes on sustainable finance and climate for Corporate Knights. He is also senior counsel for Sussex Strategy Group.

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Canada’s manufacturers generate more than 10% of total GDP, export more than $354 billion in goods each year and employ 1.7 million Canadians. Along with all the many benefits, manufacturing also has a sizable footprint. When it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there are two distinct groups: general manufacturing and what we call heavy industry. The heavy industries are the energy-intensive, primary processors, sometimes called the “smokestack industries” – steel, metal smelting, pulp and paper, lime and cement, and industrial chemicals. They consume 80% of the sector’s energy and emit more than 85% of total manufacturing GHG emissions. Their energy and emissions intensities are tied to the production technologies and processes used to make useful materials from raw inputs like trees, ores and aggregates, often in high-temperature furnaces and kilns. They are economic and employment mainstays of the communities and regions where they are located, but most of them operate in global business environments and markets where innovation is driving rapid change. For them, the low-carbon path is a game changer.

The transition to a sustainable production system is proceeding on many fronts, led by a reframing that shifts the focus from commodities to services, and includes dematerialization and lightweighting, reuse and recycling, the substitution of renewable energy for fossil fuels and information for energy, the elimination of toxic by-products and pollutants, and a redoubling of efficiency everywhere. Human production systems may never equal the elegance, efficiency and circularity of the natural systems in which they are embedded, but that is the aspirational goal and that is the direction in which they were evolving when the pandemic put the world on pause.

We have become accustomed to thinking of the primary processors as being necessarily energy- and carbon-intensive, but nowhere is the drive toward cleaner production more intense than in the heavy industry group. Most of the technologies we need to dramatically reduce emissions already exist: in patents, in some engineer’s lab or already in commercial use.

For the rest of the manufacturers, from food and beverage to the auto and industrial machinery industries, energy is no less critical an input, but it is a smaller contributor to the cost of production. Particularly for light manufacturing like consumer goods manufacturing and food processing, decarbonization is possible by electrifying the energy and transportation used, which, although it requires upfront investment, is increasingly popular because of the favourable economic paybacks. This means that there are ready-made solutions available today to significantly reduce emissions, including switching from natural gas to electric heat pumps, improving process efficiency, electrifying fleets and using alternative fuels like sustainable biofuels or hydrogen where available.

A critical component of the transition to net zero will be creating a circular economy, one that designs products for durability, uses fewer raw materials and returns as much used material back into the production chain as possible. A circular economy reduces emissions and waste sent to landfill as well as pressure on natural resources. It also creates jobs and new economic activity: the International Labour Organization projects that worldwide employment would grow 0.1% by 2030 under a circular economy compared to business-as-usual, with a net creation of 18 million green jobs.

Setting Canada’s manufacturing industry on a pathway to decarbonizing as part of building back better can help meet Canada’s goal to be net zero by 2050, as well as support good jobs by enabling the manufacturing sector to weather the economic downturn while retooling for the future and, at the same time, make Canadian companies leaders in exportable low-carbon technology.

 Some key steps for getting there include:

• creating jobs in the transition to a zero-waste economy by setting policy direction that sends a clear signal to business;
• accelerating the uptake of technology to switch from natural gas to electricity where it already exists and is affordable;
• using the power of government procurement to support the use of zero- and low-carbon materials and the adoption of deep decarbonization technologies for cement and steel, and reward producers for the amount of carbon reduced; and
• attracting businesses that build low-carbon equipment and technology in Canada with research and development and business supports.

Building Back Better Manufacturing:

The proposal

1. Drive investment and innovation toward a circular, zero waste economy: Shifting our manufacturing and retailers to support the transition to a circular, zero-waste economy can reduce the need for raw materials, support local economic development and domestic manufacturing (including “upcycling” of materials), and reduce vulnerability to global market disruptions. It can also reduce waste that goes to landfill, reduce GHG emissions and support new jobs in the technologies to reduce, reuse and recycle products in the waste management sector, which has grown three times faster than the rest of the economy over the past two decades.

The recycling industry is currently in crisis. For the industry to work, companies need to earn a return on their investments. There is a clear role for the federal government here to help create markets for recycled material, for example by establishing mandatory recycled content in products and packaging that contain plastics. The federal government could also provide carrots in the form of financial support for new investment in circular economy initiatives in provinces that agree to better harmonize their extended producer responsibility (EPR) standards (under which producers of packaging and paper are responsible for 100% of costs) as well as Nova Scotia–style landfill bans – both of which create reliable supply for recycling firms).

While waste management is largely under provincial and municipal jurisdiction, the federal government has an important role to play in setting the policy and public procurement framework to help drive investment in the circular economy. This includes:

• setting rising standards and integrating requirements for the recycled content of plastic produced to drive demand for recycled plastic in Canada and send a clear signal to recycling firms that they will have a domestic market; this would reduce vulnerabilities to supply- and value-chain interruptions and boost domestic recycling capacity;
• delivering on the government’s commitment to ban harmful single-use plastic products while providing financial carrots for provinces to adopt a more harmonized approach to landfill bans, modelled on the approach taken in the EU; and
• making producers fully responsible for their products, including packaging, at end of life by working with provinces and territories to ensure that companies that manufacture plastic products or sell items with plastic packaging are responsible for the cost of collecting and recycling, through EPR programs, and to set increasingly aggressive targets for recycling.

2. Leverage public procurement: The steel and cement sectors produce critical materials needed to build our transit, buildings and infrastructure, and they employ tens of thousands of Canadians. As part of the pathway to net zero (which the Canadian Steel Producers Association has recently adopted as a formal goal), these sectors will need significant investments in new process technologies. But if Canadian steel and cement producers do not make these investments as soon as possible so they can begin gradually dialling down emissions, there is a risk that it will cost a lot more to move quickly later to comply with Canada’s net-zero targets.

All levels of government are significant purchasers of steel and cement for the construction of public works projects like hospitals, transit and bridges. To support the decarbonization of these sectors, Canada should follow the lead of California and Europe by adopting green public-procurement policies for construction materials. California’s “Buy Clean Act” will set standards for the maximum amount of GHGs produced by steel and other building materials used in public works projects. The European Green Deal is building on existing green public-procurement policies to drive toward the EU’s net-zero goal.

The federal government and some provinces have already taken steps to lay out guidelines for greener procurement.

The federal government can send a clear signal to the steel and cement sectors that there will be a strong market in Canada for low-carbon materials by:

• paying a premium for lower-carbon cement and steel in public projects ($100 per tonne of carbon avoided), based on an industry benchmark, that declines as the cost of adopting the technology decreases;
• adopting a policy to reward lower-carbon suppliers in its own public procurement that sets a maximum threshold for GHG intensity that declines over time; and
• requiring that comparable thresholds are phased in by provincial and municipal governments for projects that receive federal government funding.

It is estimated that a $350 million per year program in subsidies for avoided greenhouse gases could (if combined with $50 million per year for measurement and verification systems and $80 million per year in R&D support) help unlock the $3.7 billion of private capital investment per year that is required for deep decarbonization in these sectors, as well as open up potential opportunities for other low-carbon building materials. With these measures, energy economist Chris Bataille estimates that by 2030, the carbon intensity of steel and cement could be reduced by 30%, and the technology will have developed such that new facilities could be net-zero carbon by 2035.

3. Incentivize electrification of light manufacturing: Light manufacturing has been reducing its energy use over the last several years and increasing electrification. There is an opportunity to accelerate this process and reduce GHGs quickly by creating a financial incentive for facilities to convert from natural gas to electricity, making them more efficient and competitive and securing jobs. The federal government could help spur investment by the private sector in technologies like heat pumps with a time-limited investment tax credit of 50% for the purchase and installation of equipment that eliminates the use of natural gas. To attract the facilities that manufacture this equipment to Canada, such as heat pump manufacturers, the federal government could extend this investment tax incentive for new heat-pump manufacturing facilities located here.

4. Incentivize new circular, zero-waste facilities: In addition to setting the policy and procurement framework to help drive the transition to a circular, zero-waste economy, the federal government can help attract new businesses and technologies to Canada to take advantage of the market. To accelerate these new investments, the federal government could offer an investment tax incentive, similar to what was used to spur solar investment in the U.S., for businesses that want to set up in provinces that have established a policy framework that creates the right conditions for a circular economy (including the phase-in of harmonized EPR and bans along the lines of Nova Scotia, which has among the best diversion rates in the country).

Smart, dynamic policies can help us build back better by accelerating the circular economy, electrifying light industry and decarbonizing heavy industry – moves that will help us build a resilient foundation to strengthen Canada’s manufacturing sector for a thriving 21st-century low-carbon economy.

Ralph Torrie is senior associate with Sustainability Solutions Group and partner at Torrie Smith Associates.

Toby Heaps is the CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights.

With files from Céline Bak.

Notice to reader: Please be aware some of the figures and other details in this white paper have been updated in the Final Report to reflect feedback.

The post Building Back Better by greening industry appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When it comes to tackling Canada’s carbon emissions, the fuels that power our cars and heat our homes garner the most attention, but the steel and concrete that go into those vehicles and buildings are also highly carbon intensive. Concrete and steel together account for 14.7% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which cause most global warming. Most of the technologies we need to drastically reduce these emissions already exist: in patents, in some engineer’s lab or in commercial use where conventional technology doesn’t work as well.

Another way to cut emissions is by encouraging design that uses less steel and cement altogether – and uses them more strategically combined with other materials, like wood and sustainable plastics. Updated building and infrastructure codes or regulations that put a price on carbon would encourage builders to try out alternatives.

Other game-changing technologies are within reach, but they need developmental support or guaranteed early markets to build economies of scale: primary steel made with hydrogen and electricity instead of coal, and new cement chemistries and processes that are virtually carbon-free, in line with the 2050 goal for net-zero CO2 emissions the Canadian Steel Producers Association has set for itself.

Here’s a breakdown of how a $1 billion federal investment a year through 2025 could begin to bring these climate game-changers to scale:

• $100 million per year to develop measurement and verification systems to allow carbon pricing and regulations to operate more effectively, and allow already lower emissions producers to capture market share;
• $200 million per year for research and development; and
• $700 million per year in smart, dynamic subsidies to help emerging technologies and approaches prove their effectiveness for broader use (the less GHG-intensive the technology, the greater the subsidies).

These would apply to ultra-low-emissions steel, cement and chemical products and their substitutes for public infrastructure, buildings and vehicles. The subsidies could go towards making all new and retrofit government buildings and infrastructure low emissions in both materials and energy use.

With this $1 billion green jolt to the steel, cement and other materials sectors, the government could stimulate the economy in the short run, reduce Canada’s emissions and improve our long-run competitiveness in a low-carbon world.

Chris Bataille is an energy economist who serves as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The post Getting the carbon out of concrete and steel appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Pilot examples include Sweden’s Hybrit, which aims to replace coking coal with hydrogen and electricity; Quebec’s Elysis, described as the world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process; and Carbicrete, also from Quebec, which is developing cement-free, carbon-negative concrete.

While still years away from commercialization, projects like these are offering hope that carbon-intensive industries are taking action to reduce their environmental footprint, despite the high price tags involved.

There was little progress on such initiatives until a few years ago, says Chris Bataille, an energy policy consultant and researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), a non-profit research centre headquartered in Paris. “A lot of the technology has been floating around for years, but little attention was paid to it, until now,” says Bataille, who is also a lead author for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The shift came after the 2015 Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to less than 1.5 C.

Bataille believes it’s critical for industries to develop zero or nearly-zero carbon projects today so that they become a standard by the early 2030s, given their 20- to 30-year lifespans. “We have to do that to stay on track of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius,” says Bataille. “The whole economy has to go to zero somewhere between 2055 and 2075 for those targets to be achievable.”

Here is a look at some innovative pilots across the aluminum, steel and cement industries:

Aluminum

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy intensity of aluminum production declined by 1.7% in 2016, compared to a 1.9% annual reduction from 2010 to 2016. The IEA is calling for an annual decline of 1.2% to reach Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) objectives by 2030. It also says aluminum production from recycled new and old scrap needs to increase “considerably” to 46% globally.

A pilot in Quebec promises to be part of the industry’s intensity-reduction solution. In May 2018, Alcoa and Rio Tinto unveiled what they describe as “the world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process,” through a partnership called Elysis, which refers to the electrolysis of alumina, a process at the centre of aluminum smelting.

Apple, which helped to facilitate the collaboration between the two aluminum giants, is also investing in Elysis, based on its own efforts to decarbonize its operations and supply chain. Alcoa, Rio Tinto, Apple and the federal and Quebec provincial governments are providing a combined investment of $188 million.

The partnership “signals the most significant innovation in the aluminum industry in more than a century,” the companies state, through an aluminum-making process that produces oxygen and eliminates all direct greenhouse gas emissions from the traditional smelting process.

Alcoa, Rio Tinto and Apple are developing the “world’s first carbon-free aluminum smelting process,” which, if fully implemented, could eliminate 6.5 million tonnes of GHGs.

The technology, which is expected to be commercialized by 2024, could eliminate the equivalent of 6.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions if fully implemented at existing aluminum smelters in Canada – roughly equal to taking nearly 1.8 million light-duty vehicles off the road, the companies say.

Elysis, which will be headquartered in Montreal with a research facility in Quebec’s Saguenay-Lac-Saint Jean region, will develop and license the technology so it can be used to retrofit existing smelters or build new facilities. The claim is that the technology will increase productivity by creating more aluminum in the same-size smelting cell as the traditional process.

Executives says the technology is expected to also reduce operating costs by about 15%.

“It hits the mark on the environment, it hits the mark on operating costs and on volume and productivity and it will allow us to license technology to either replace existing operations or build new ones,” says Elysis CEO Vincent Christ. Rather than costing more, Christ says the carbon-free method for making aluminum will actually be cheaper. “From the current work it is realistic to assume that the operational cost will be 15% lower compared to modern Hall-Heroult cell using carbon anodes,” he says. “The work we are doing, out of all of this, is to make this an attractive business case for the aluminum industry.”

Meanwhile, Russian aluminum giant Rusal is targeting 2021 to roll out its own line of carbon-free aluminum, so the race is on.

Public policies will play an important role to incentivize the demand for low carbon products and solutions. Whereas policies are currently focusing on the supply-side (reduction of emissions in production), major opportunities (in terms of emissions reductions) lie on the demand-side. Demand-pull policies (from public procurement to building standards and norms) should therefore be the focus of attention and cooperation with the construction value chain.

Cement

The carbon dioxide intensity of cement showed little change in recent years, according to the IEA, but still needs to decline by 0.3% annually through to 2030, as production is expected to increase.

According to a report from the Pembina Institute, the cement industry is “one of the most carbon-intensive industrial processes” given that half of its emissions “are directly linked to the chemical reaction at the centre of the process, and because the primary fuel used in the process is coal.”

There are efforts underway to reduce the industry’s emissions by using fuels other than coal in the production process.
LafargeHolcim, the world’s largest cement company, for instance, is now using waste materials like used tires to replace more than 90% of coal fuel in some of its plants, according to company spokesperson Eike Christian Meuter.

A cutting-edge example from Canada is Carbicrete, a Montreal-based company with what it describes as a “cement-free, carbon-negative concrete solution.” Carbicrete’s technology replaces cement in the concrete mix with steel slag, a byproduct of the steelmaking process that is often placed into landfills.

The company says the process is carbon-negative because it avoids the emissions that come with cement production and uses carbon dioxide instead of heat and steam to cure its concrete. It’s the combination of avoidance and sequestration that lead to carbon-negativity, it says.

Carbicrete claims its construction blocks are “stronger, less expensive and [help to] reduce manufacturers’ carbon footprint.” It says each block it produces helps to avoid 2.5 kg of CO2 emissions as compared to traditional concrete, which adds 1.5 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere.

“We are solving three problems; we are replacing cement, we are getting rid of steel slag, which is an industrial waste, and we are permanently sequestering carbon dioxide in concrete,” says Chris Stern, Carbicrete’s co-founder and CEO.

Because the process requires carbon dioxide, it has to be made in the factory. Stern says the pre-cast market is massive, with its products accounting for about a third of global demand for cement.

Last fall, Carbicrete received $2.1 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to help fund its pilot project. It will go towards building a limited production facility at an existing concrete plant and ratcheting up production from pilot to commercial scale over the course of a 32-month period. Carbicrete said it has so far assembled a consortium of project partners that includes a concrete maker, an industrial gas company and steel slag handler.

The steel and cement sectors are responsible for over 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while accounting for less than 1% of global research and development investments.

Steel

The energy intensity of crude steel fell by 1% in 2016, the IEA says, compared to an average 0.4% annual decline from 2010 to 2016. The IEA says the energy intensity of crude steel needs to decline by 1.2% annually to reach the SDS target by 2030.

The decrease is “especially important” given that global steel production continues to grow, it says.

One green project getting a lot of attention is Hybrit (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), a partnership among Swedish firms SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall described as “the world’s first fossil-free steelmaking technology, with virtually no carbon footprint.” Hybrit aims to replace the coke that is traditionally used in steelmaking with hydrogen produced from renewable electricity. The production process will emit water instead of carbon dioxide, it said. “This can be a reality when the use of coal and coke in steel production is replaced by hydrogen produced using fossil-free energy sources,” the company states.

A World Steel Association article says Hybrit’s production costs will be around 20% to 30% more than the traditional steelmaking processes, but “that gap is expected to shrink over time, with the potential for increasing costs for carbon dioxide emissions through the European Union Emissions Trading System, and an expected decline in the cost of renewable energy.”

Construction of the pilot plant started in 2018, with a goal to have a solution for fossil-free steel by 2035. Hybrit claims that, if successful, it can reduce Sweden’s carbon dioxide emissions by 10% and Finland’s by 7%. The project aligns with Sweden’s goal to be the first fossil-free country by 2045.

The long road to decarbonization

While projects like these hold promise to help reduce industrial emissions in the steel, cement and aluminum sectors, Bataille says more has to be done, now: “I think a lot of really exciting stuff is happening, but it’s not happening fast enough.” Emissions have to come down “really fast,” he says, which means all new industrial facilities have to be zero-emission to stay under the “danger line” in terms of global warming.

One challenge will be taking some of these pilots and turning them into larger-scale projects that can reduce emissions in a more meaningful way. “That takes a really aggressive effort,” Bataille says.

There may be no better bang for the decarbonization buck than investing in cost-effective new carbon-free processes for making cement and steel. The two industries represent 10% of the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions problem, yet account for less the 1% of the global research and development (R&D) spend. “This is because there are huge concentrated costs and no direct benefits for steel and cement in decarbonization. Most of the benefits are societal,” says Bataille.

Cost is a significant hurdle, confirms Wendy Shen-Juarez, clean revenue and research manager at Corporate Knights. She says low-or-no-carbon steel and cement pilots are promising but are so far too expensive for mainstream use compared to traditional steel and cement. Meanwhile, low-carbon or recycled aluminum products are more viable because new or virgin aluminum from bauxite is energy intensive.

In many cases, change will begin with smaller pilots proving out the new technologies, Shen-Juarez says. “Smaller, more nimble companies are trying these new technologies. Then, once you have enough of those, bigger companies will take note … and implement something on a larger scale.”

Governments will also need to move the needle through policy changes, including R&D support, green procurement and content regulations that require use of zero GHG materials, says Bataille. Private industry also needs to be on board. Carbon taxes and other policy measures are putting on some pressure, but industry needs to develop and scale up projects that will reduce its emissions sooner rather than later.

Said Bataille: “Once someone proves something works, it becomes the new standard – at least, that’s the goal.”

Brenda Bouw is a freelance writer and editor as well as an author and ghostwriter based in Vancouver.

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