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[Episode #236] – Zero Carbon Industry

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The energy transition is making good progress on several fronts. Renewables are displacing fossil fueled electricity generation. Heat pumps are decarbonizing space heating. Electric vehicles of all sizes are replacing oil-powered cars.

But the world's industrial decarbonization is really just getting started. Industry generates roughly one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so solutions for this sector are critical for the energy transition.

We have made faster progress in decarbonizing electricity, transportation, and heating because it’s easier to replace a handful of dirty technologies with clean alternatives. Decarbonizing industry, however, is a far more complex task, involving thousands of materials, processes, and end products. That’s why they used to be called “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors.

Fortunately, there are clear starting points. More than half of industrial emissions come from steel, cement, and chemicals—which we know how to decarbonize. And there are solutions on the horizon for the rest of industry too.

In this conversation, Jeffrey Rissman, Senior Director of Industry at the San Francisco based think-tank Energy Innovation, walks us through each of the industrial sectors and the solutions for each one. Jeff is the author of a recent book titled Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity, and after listening to this episode, you’ll know just about everything you need to know about industrial decarbonization.

Guest:

Jeffrey Rissman is Senior Director of Industry at Energy Innovation, where he leads the company’s work on technologies and policies to eliminate industrial greenhouse gas emissions. He is the author of Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity (2024) and coauthor of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy (2018). In 2024, Jeffrey was appointed by Sec. Jennifer Granholm to serve on the Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee.

Jeff is also the creator of the Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model that quantifies the effects of various energy and environmental policies in combination, predicting outputs such as fuel use, pollutant emissions, financial cost or savings, electric vehicle deployment, power sector structure, and more. Versions of the simulator have been developed for an ever-growing list of countries and regions, in partnership with in-country government agencies or NGOs, accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

Previously, Jeff worked on policies supporting R&D for clean energy and efficiency technologies for the American Energy Innovation Council, where he led a survey of 17 R&D leaders investigating trends, opportunities, and challenges to unleashing private sector energy R&D.

Jeff holds an M.S. in Environmental Sciences and Engineering and a Masters in City and Regional Planning, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a Research Fellow for the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, where he studied aircraft emissions for the Federal Aviation Administration. Jeff also holds a B.A. in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.

On the Web:  https://www.jeffreyrissman.com

Recording date: October 5, 2024

Air date: November 6, 2024

Geek rating: 9