What is it about?
The opportunities and challenges to reducing industrial energy demand and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the Chemicals sector are evaluated with a focus on the situation in the United Kingdom (UK), although the lessons learned are applicable across much of the industrialised world. The improvement potential of various technological interventions has been identified in terms of their energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Currently-available best practice technologies (BPTs) will lead to further, short-term energy and CO2 emissions savings in chemicals processing, but the prospects for the commercial exploitation of innovative technologies by mid-21st century are far more speculative. A set of industrial decarbonisation ‘technology roadmaps’ out to the mid-21st Century are also reported, based on various alternative scenarios. These yield low-carbon transition pathways that represent future projections which match short-term and long-term (2050) targets with specific technological solutions to help meet the key energy saving and decarbonisation goals. The contents of the roadmaps were built up on the basis of the improvement potentials associated with various processes employed in the chemicals industry. They help identify the steps needed to be undertaken by developers, policy makers and other stakeholders in order to ensure the decarbonisation of the UK chemicals industry.
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Why is it important?
The Chemicals sector can be characterised as being heterogeneous; embracing a diverse range of products (including advanced materials, cleaning fluids, composites, dyes, paints, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and surfactants). It sits on the boundary between energy-intensive (EI) and non-energy-intensive (NEI) industrial sectors. The attainment of significant falls in carbon emissions over this period will depends critically on the adoption of a small number of key technologies [e.g., carbon capture and storage (CCS), energy efficiency techniques, and bioenergy], alongside a decarbonisation of the electricity supply.
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The work reported here was supported by a series of UK research grants and contracts awarded by various bodies associated with the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Energy Programme for which the second author (GPH) was the holder. That associated with industrial energy demand and carbon emissions reduction originally formed a part of the ‘core’ research programme of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC); Phase 2, 2009–2014 [under Grant NE/G007748/1]. The first author (PWG) and third author (JBN) undertook their contributions to the present work as part of a UKERC flexible funding project entitled ‘Industrial Energy Use from a Bottom-up Perspective’ [for which the second author (GPH) was the Principal Investigator]. The second author (GPH) was also a Co- Investigator of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s (BBSRC) Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC) during 2009–2013, as part of the ‘Lignocellulosic Conversion to Ethanol’ (LACE) Programme [under Grant Ref: BB/G01616X/1]. During the preparation of this paper, the second (GPH) and third (JBN) authors continued to work in the field of industrial energy use and carbon emissions reduction; supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) ‘End Use Energy Demand’ (EUED) Programme, as part of the Centre for Industrial Energy, Materials and Products (CIE-MAP) [under Grant EP/N022645/1], as a Co-Director and Research Fellow respectively.
Professor Emeritus Geoffrey P Hammond
University of Bath
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This page is a summary of: Industrial energy use and carbon emissions reduction in the chemicals sector: A UK perspective, Applied Energy, August 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2017.08.010.
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