US awards $6b to projects aiming for greener industries
WASHINGTON — the biden administration plans to spend up to $6 billion on new technologies to cut carbon dioxide emissions from heavy industries such as steel, cement, chemicals, and aluminum, which are all enormous contributors to global warming but which have so far been incredibly difficult to clean up.
Energy Secretary Jennifer granholm said monday that her agency would partially fund 33 projects in 20 states to test methods for curbing emissions from a wide variety of factories and industrial plants, calling it “the single largest industrial decarbonization investment in American history.”
Constellium, an aluminum producer, would receive up to $75 million to build a first-of-a-kind aluminum casting plant in Ravenswood, W.Va., that can run on cleaner burning hydrogen fuels rather than natural gas.
Kraft Heinz, a food manufacturer, would get up to $170.9 million to install electric boilers and heat pumps at 10 facilities across the country, where they would be used to generate the large amounts of heat needed for things like drying macaroni without directly burning fossil fuels.
Cleveland-Cliffs, a steel manufacturer, would get up to $500 million to help retire a large coal-consuming blast furnace in middletown, Ohio, and replace it with two furnaces that use electricity to turn scrap into steel. the company would also test ways to produce steel using hydrogen.
While the projects themselves would put a relatively small dent in US emissions, granholm said the goal was to demonstrate novel technologies that can scale up rapidly and “set a new gold standard for clean manufacturing in the United States and around the world.”
Heavy industry is one of the nation’s largest sources of planet-warming pollution, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all emissions. many factories burn coal or natural gas to produce the heat needed to create steam, temper glass, or turn iron into steel. Cement-makers emit carbon dioxide as part of the process of transforming limestone into cement. Chemical producers use oil and gas as raw materials for their products.
In theory, there are technologies that can cut emissions. Industrial heat pumps or thermal batteries could help factories generate heat from renewable electricity. Cement-makers could capture and bury their carbon dioxide. Steel-makers could use clean hydrogen instead of coal. but many of those solutions are expensive and in their infancy.
policy makers have also been hesitant to crack down on industrial emissions for fear that factories and jobs could move abroad to places with looser environmental rules.