A Finnish firm thinks it can cut industrial carbon emissions by a third
solar panels or nuclear reactors. Petrol-powered cars can be replaced with ones that use zero-carbon electricity to charge batteries. But not every part of an economy is so easy to decarbonise, even in principle.
Three heavy industries—cement, chemicals and steelmaking—are particularly tricky to clean up. One reason is that all rely on chemical processes that need very high temperatures. Extracting iron from its ore, for instance, is the first step in steelmaking.
Temperatures inside the furnaces used to do that can exceed 1,600°C. Cement kilns, which convert limestone into clinker, one of cement’s raw ingredients, can reach 1,400°C. Because it is tricky or impossible to produce such temperatures for some industrial processes using electricity alone, firms rely on fossil fuels.
Green-minded businesses have been exploring alternatives. Hydrogen, for instance, can be produced by splitting water into its component elements. If that is done with clean energy, the gas can be burned as a zero-carbon fuel.
Another option might be to stick with fossil fuels, but to capture and bury the carbon dioxide they generate, an idea known as carbon capture and storage. But both technologies are nascent, and would require the building of a great deal of new infrastructure that does not yet exist. At the Brightlands Campus, a state- and industry-backed innovation centre near Maastricht, in the Netherlands, a Finnish engineering firm called Coolbrook is hoping to change that.
Its “RotoDynamic" system is designed to supply just the sorts of super-high temperatures needed by heavy industry—and to do so while being powered solely by electricity. The easiest way to think about Coolbrook’s system is as a gas turbine in reverse. A conventional gas
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