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Currently, industry consumes about 30 percent of the total national energy use, 80 percent of which is in the form of heat. This edition of EnergyDays focused on developments towards CO₂ neutral industrial heat. Chair of the day Herbert Zondag, full professor at ¹û¶³´«Ã½ and senior scientist at TNO, first provided an overview of the state of affairs when it comes to decarbonizing industrial heat.

‘In 25 years, industry should be carbon neutral. For industry, this comes down to one major investment cycle, so we have to be quick,’ Zondag sketched the urgency of the industrial heat transition. Decarbonization of industry requires new process designs, CO₂ neutral heating technologies, new energy infrastructure and dedicated policy measures to steer this transition, making this a very complex challenge. ‘Today, we are discussing two major topics related to decarbonizing industrial heat: the first is about transforming industrial processes, where three speakers are discussing strategies, system change and the current state of affairs in the steel industry. A second major topic is the redesign of CO₂ neutral heating technology. Another three speakers will talk about electrification, efficiency and heat storage.’

Herbert Zondag (¹û¶³´«Ã½ & TNO):
"In 25 years, industry should be carbon neutral. For industry, this comes down to one major investment cycle, so we have to be quick."

Toward promising business cases
Machteld van den Broek, Professor of Energy System Integration at Delft University of Technology, delved into strategies to decarbonize key industrial processes. ‘Our industrial processes are very integrated; coal, gas, oil and renewables are going everywhere. So, if you want to decarbonize industry, the entire system has to change,’ she stated. In her presentation, she explored various decarbonization solutions for key industrial processes, including direct electrification, hydrogen utilization, energy efficiency, circularity, biomass, and COâ‚‚ capture and storage. For a successful implementation, four conditions have to be met, she explained. ‘Solutions should be cost-effective, the technology should be ready to be implemented, there should be sufficient supply of clean energy, and the required infrastructure should be available. And, we will have to talk about costs, since in the end, someone has to pay for all of this.’ From an order of magnitude calculation of what each ton of avoided CO₂ would cost with currently available technology, Van den Broek concluded that for most technologies there is no business case yet. She concluded that ‘there is still a lot of work to do to meet all of the necessary conditions, and we need to do the necessary no regret investments in infrastructure now.’

The next speaker was Gert Jan Kramer, Professor of Sustainable Energy Supply Systems at Utrecht University, who zoomed out to take a holistic perspective on the transition at hand. ‘System changes are damn hard, since nobody owns the system,’ he said. ‘Achieving climate neutrality is possible, but not under the current circumstances. Industry makes investment decisions based on solid business cases. But at the moment, industry perceives to be working on a shaky policy environment, where they experience uncertainty and a sense of risk.’ He ended his presentation by arguing that decarbonizing industry should be regarded as a public utility. ‘We should address this issue on a national level, and organize consortia as the Netherlands as a whole.’

Gert Jan Kramer (Utrecht University):
"System changes are damn hard, since nobody owns the system. Achieving climate neutrality is possible, but not under the current circumstances."

Long term projects
The final speaker before the break was Tim Peeters, Department Manager Iron and Steel R&D at Tata Steel. He presented the challenges the steel industry faces when it comes to phasing out coal. Today, coal is used not only for its energy content but also for its mechanical properties, which means that the entire steel production chain has to be redesigned. ‘We are not only reducing our CO₂ footprint, but also transitioning toward green steel and circular steel, reducing the impact on our environment, and reducing waste streams.’ The company is involved in a long term project to achieve their sustainability goals, he explained. ‘We are currently transforming our traditional blast furnace process toward electric steel making, where we first use a chemical reduction step and then green power for the melting process. We’ve started this entire process a couple of years ago, and foresee the closure of the blast furnace plants for 2029. These types of transformations are huge projects; installing a new plant in an existing running plant is not something you can do overnight.’

After the break, the focus of the meeting shifted toward redesigning heat technology. Robert de Boer, Senior Scientist Project Lead at TNO, first talked about barriers and possibilities of various industrial electrification technologies. There are three major technologies for electrification of industry, he stated. Heat pumps and thermal energy storage, direct electrification of chemical processes, and fuel flexible and hybrid combustion. The barriers for implementation are on the technological, financial and policy level, he said. ‘We need to increase the scale of heating technologies and power densities, lower the CAPEX and OPEX, lower the cost for local network upgrades, and fix the grid availability and congestion problems.’

Untapped potential
Katerina Kermeli, researcher from Utrecht University, presented the results of her EU project on the availability of excess heat. Across the EU, energy-intensive industries release significant amounts of unused heat into the environment. Capturing and utilizing this excess heat is an energy efficiency measure that can substantially contribute to the decarbonization of other energy demand such as the heat needed in nearby industries and buildings and district heating. Kermeli and her colleagues estimated how much excess heat could be used to decarbonize district heating. They looked at different industries, ranging from cement, glass and aluminum producers to the paper and pulp industry, and concluded that the current potential at the European level is some 230 PJ per year. ‘This means that excess heat could provide 17 percent of the district heating demand. When we would take additional measures to harvest even more of the heat, we estimate that we could provide for over half of the district heating demand from excess industrial heat.’

Katerina Kermeli (Utrecht University):
"Excess heat could provide 17 percent of the district heating demand. With additional measures, we estimate that over half of the district heating demand could be met from industrial excess heat."

Andrea Gutierrez, Group Leader at the German Aerospace Center DLR – Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, was the final speaker of the day. She presented her group’s work on thermal storage solutions. ‘Within our institute, we work on four innovative storage concepts, for a wide range of temperatures, ranging from 100 °C to 1000 °C. My own work is directed toward phase changing materials, where the challenge is to match the material to the application at hand. In the project for example, we want to reduce the use of a fuel-oil fired water boiler in a paper mill process. And in the project, we are using electricity from a solar plant to produce steam for the vulcanization of rubber in truck tires.’

In the concluding panel discussion, the speakers were joined by John Nijenhuis from Delft University of Technology, who is coordinating the consortium. He concluded the meeting by stating that ‘industry is willing to take steps, they just do not know how. We need to take gradual steps and address the challenges we face along the way in a collaborative effort. Together, we can figure out how we can stay in business while the energy feed is changing.’

John Nijenhuis (TU Delft & HeatFlex consortium):
"Industry is willing to take steps, they just do not know how. We need to take gradual steps and address the challenges we face along the way in a collaborative effort."

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