Chart: Heavy industry is the world’s biggest decarbonization challenge

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. Canary thanks Clean Energy Counsel for its support of the column.

The world’s biggest decarbonization challenge comes not from cars, planes, or power plants, but from the highly polluting heavy industries at the heart of modern society.

New data from the Rhodium Group shows that, worldwide, no sector emits more planet-warming carbon dioxide than industry. That fact is not projected to change in the decades to come.

Cement, steel, petrochemicals, and various other mass-produced industrial metals and materials, from aluminum to glass, are ubiquitous. 

They also make up an enormous and rising share of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

In 2022, the industrial sector accounted for 31 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, Rhodium forecasts that the industrial sector could emit as much CO₂ equivalent as the power, transportation, and building sectors combined.

The biggest driver of industrial emissions is oil and gas production. The manufacturing of cement and other non-metallic minerals is the next-biggest contributor, followed by steel and iron production.

Emissions from oil and gas production mostly stem from the enormous amount of ​“fugitive” methane that escapes into the atmosphere: 80 percent of the sector’s emissions take this form.

In cement production, there are two key sources of emissions: high-heat, gas-fired kilns and the limestone used as an ingredient in Portland cement, which releases CO₂ when heated up. Steelmaking emissions mainly come from the use of coal-fired blast furnaces to make iron.

Many of these industrial sectors have historically been described as ​“hard-to-decarbonize,” but in recent years experts have pushed back on that label as new pathways to cleaning up heavy industry have emerged or been proven out.

Rhodium, for its part, sees the oil and gas industry’s fugitive methane problem as solvable thanks to ​“cost-effective mitigation solutions that exist today,” the report notes. Plus, if global fossil-fuel consumption falls due to the rise of clean energy, heat pumps, and EVs, those emissions will follow suit.

The report also sees a solid pathway for the steelmaking sector to become less carbon-intensive by increasing both the use of electric arc furnaces, which use electricity to recycle scrap steel, as well as an alternative, coal-free ironmaking process called direct reduction, which can be fueled by fossil gas or hydrogen.

The research firm is less optimistic about cement emissions in the near term, citing a lack of mature technologies. Major cement producers and startups are working on different techniques to chip away at emissions, and companies are also devising ways to produce low-carbon Portland cement, but the industry is still far from the wholesale transformation needed to radically reduce emissions.

To get the cement industry — and the rest of the industrial sector — on track to completely eliminate emissions will, at the very least, require a ​“considerable acceleration in policy and innovation,” as Rhodium puts it. 

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