Volts podcast: Rebecca Dell on decarbonizing heavy industry

In this episode, Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation, offers a comprehensive overview of the problems of industrial decarbonization, the most promising technological solutions in steel, cement, and chemicals, and the kinds of policies that could accelerate progress. Incredibly informative.

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Rebecca Dell, February 11, 2022

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

For most of the carbon-intensive sectors of the economy — electricity, transportation, buildings — we have a pretty good sense of how to eliminate carbon emissions. None of those sectors will be easy to decarbonize. Every one is an enormous practical challenge. But in each case, the basic path to zero is clear, and it mostly involves switching out fossil-fueled machines with machines that generate or run on clean electricity.

Then there’s that other wedge on the pie chart, the one that gets less attention: industry. Manufacturing, mining, construction, and waste processing are responsible for about a third of global carbon emissions (about a quarter of US emissions).

The path to zero emissions in heavy industry is much murkier than it is for other sectors. Low-carbon alternatives are early in development and commercialization; in some cases, there are no alternatives except to capture and bury the carbon when it’s emitted.

In future pods, I might get deeper into some specific industries (like steel). But for this one, I wanted to attempt a broad overview: What You Need to Know About Decarbonizing Industry.

Nobody knows the sector and its challenges better than Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation. Dell previously worked at the Department of Energy, where she helped coordinate Obama’s climate action plan, and before that was a research scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s a researcher, author, and, as more attention turns to industry, an increasingly frequent podcast guest. (She was on Canary’s Catalyst pod last month.)

It takes a while — okay, almost two hours — but Dell and I manage to cover all the big industrial sectors, why they emit so much, prospects for reducing emissions, and the policies that could make it happen. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shopping primer on industry and climate, this is for you.

Without further ado, Rebecca Dell, welcome to Volts.

Rebecca Dell:

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

David Roberts:

I'm excited for this. We are going to attempt to cover a lot of ground. I want to try to give a 30,000-foot overview of industry and decarbonization; obviously any of the subtopics could be podcasts of their own.

Among the Volts audience, people are probably basically familiar with the famous Energy Information Administration pie chart of where US greenhouse gases come from. There are wedges for transportation, electricity, buildings, agriculture — I think people mostly have their heads around how to decarbonize those.

Then there's that big wedge that just says “industry.” My sense is that, to a lot of people, that is a bit of a black box — it’s not clear what's in it or how to approach decarbonizing it. Historically, that has been the neglected stepchild of the decarbonization conversation. But am I right in saying that attention on that little wedge has rapidly increased in recent years?

Rebecca Dell:

Yes, and for people who work on this area, it's been exciting to see how much new interest has come in the last year or two.

David Roberts:

Do you have an explanation for why?

Rebecca Dell:

The phenomenon that is more in need of explanation is why so few people were looking at this area until the last year or so, considering that the industrial sector globally, under the most parsimonious accounting, is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and under a broader definition, it's responsible for more than a third.

David Roberts:

Does that roughly echo the US pie chart? Or is the US different because we have deindustrialized a little bit?

Rebecca Dell:

The US is a little lower in terms of the portion of our emissions that come from the industrial sector. But if you add back in the greenhouse gas emissions that come from manufacturing products in other countries that will be consumed in the United States — you can think of those as our imported emissions — then you get back to something pretty close to the global average.

David Roberts:

So let's say about a third — that's a lot of emissions to neglect for this long. When we say industry, what do we mean by that? What does that category inclue? What are the boundaries? And what, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, are the top line items?

Rebecca Dell:

That's a really important question, because when we talk about “industry” in the climate community, it’s a piece of stealth jargon. It’s the worst kind of jargon: it's a word that sounds like a normal word, but it actually is a jargon word.

Basically, what we're talking about when we talk about industry is everything that's not agriculture or energy, which is to say, it's the material economy. It’s mining, manufacturing, construction, waste processing. It's physical stuff, as opposed to energy.

As you might imagine, there are a lot of fields of human endeavor that are included in that very broad set of activities. It's a very heterogeneous sector. But for all of the millions of different types of activities that are included in the industrial sector, there's an astonishingly short list that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the greenhouse gas emissions.

David Roberts:

That's very useful for our podcast purposes.

Rebecca Dell:

It is. It allows one to simplify one's focus considerably. There are three real standouts here: steel, cement, and commodity chemicals.

The chemical industry itself is, again, varied and heterogeneous; they produce a lot of different products. But there are about 10 chemicals that are basically the precursors for two products — plastic and fertilizer — that dominate those emissions. You can think of this in four product categories: cement, steel, plastic, and fertilizer. Just making those materials is responsible for two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions from the entire industrial sector.

David Roberts:

Insofar as you figure out how to decarbonize those, will those lessons be transferable to all those other varied applications? Or are they so heterogenous that you have to do it one by one?

Rebec