Corporate Climate Change Series. What gets measured gets managed – taking the initiative on climate adaptation, P8
- Shidonna Raven
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
January 13, 2024
Source: World Economic Forum
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
What's the World Economic Forum doing about the transition to clean energy?
Biofuels are another option. Organic fuel sources such as wood chips, sawdust and agricultural waste can be burned in boilers or furnaces. This can have good synergies with biomass-heavy industries.
For example, many paper and pulps mills burn their unused wood waste to produce clean heat and food processing companies often have biomass and biogas as part of their decarbonization strategy for renewable heat.
Hydrogen can burn at around 2,000°C, so hydrogen can also provide a low retrofit solution to commercial and industrial heating equipment. However, traditional production of hydrogen emits plenty of CO2.
So we’d need to produce hydrogen through water electrolysis powered by zero-carbon electricity, AKA green hydrogen, or from natural gas and biogas with pre- or post-combustion carbon capture, AKA turquoise or blue hydrogen.
However, clean hydrogen is not yet affordable, and hydrogen is an uniquely challenging fuel to transport and distribute. These challenges will need to be solved before hydrogen is widely used.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves capturing CO2 from the smokestack, and storing it underground. CCS can be applied to large point sources of carbon emissions such as major industrial factories.
However, capturing and compressing carbon requires energy, reducing the overall energy efficiency. And the geological formations where CO2 can be reliably sequestered without leakage is often located very far away from businesses and factories, and CO2 is a gas and thus also expensive to transport and store.
Lastly, thermal storage is being researched as a means of storing excess renewable electricity produced during periods of high generation, such as solar at noon. The challenge lies in finding a low-cost storage medium with fantastic insulation that can keep the heat hot enough over hours and days.
The recovery of heat from storage and its transportation to the factory and into the target material that requires the heating is also difficult, especially for high-temperature applications where steam cannot be used. Finally, the complexity cost of retrofitting a thermal storage solution is another challenge.
Does your company have a climate change plan? Is it complaint with current climate laws? Why? Why not?
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