Decarbonisation Technology - August 2023 Issue

priorities to support the wider deployment of industrial decarbonisation technologies in the 2030s. Innovation is needed to bring down the costs for these, overcome technical challenges, and increase industry confidence. The UK has set an ambition of supporting up to 10GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030, with at least half from electrolytic production. Government-funded programmes, such as the Hydrogen Supply 2 competition, aim to support the development of innovative low-carbon hydrogen supply and generation. It is looking to address specific technological gaps to make hydrogen production, storage, and supply more efficient and cost- effective, as well as funding real‑world testing of more mature innovative hydrogen supply solutions. Electrification is also being explored by industrial sites. Electrifying industrial processes which currently use high-carbon fuels poses one of the biggest fuel switching technical challenges due to the very different nature of electric vs, for example, natural gas fuels. This can result in very different operating conditions using electricity, which is often less of an issue with hydrogen/ biofuels. Biofuels and waste-derived fuels are other options being considered within industry and are particularly promising for remote/dispersed sites. Other industrial sectors face unique challenges; for example, the cement sector has likely unavoidable process emissions which require carbon capture solutions. The cement sector represents about 7% of global CO 2 emissions (MPA, 2020), with process carbon emissions representing almost two-thirds of total UK sector emissions. As part of the latest funding announcements from NZIP, more than £80 million of funding has been provided to businesses to demonstrate innovative low-carbon solutions. This included 13 projects which will receive a share of funding from the IFS programme to demonstrate their fuel switching solutions and increase the uptake of low-carbon fuels. These projects cover hydrogen and biofuels as well as the electrification of some industrial processes. Industrial sectors represented by the programme include glass, aluminium, food & beverage, paper, and hydrogen distribution. Also included in this announcement were winners of the Hydrogen Bioenergy with Carbon Capture

and Storage (BECCS) Innovation Programme to turn biomass and waste, such as sewage, into hydrogen with carbon capture, and winners of the CCUS Innovation programme, which includes recycling CO 2 for fertiliser production. Glass Futures case study One of these 13 projects is led by Glass Futures, a not-for-profit Research Technology Organisation supported by members from within the glass sector. This £6 million project seeks to demonstrate the viability of low- cost, sustainable waste-derived fuels in decarbonising firing processes within the glass and ceramics sectors. The project will identify and demonstrate a range of economically and technically attractive low-cost, bio-derived fuels for a range of industrial glass and ceramics sites with furnaces/kilns of differing designs/scales. Some of the world’s largest glass manufacturers and Glass Futures members O-I, Ardagh, and Encirc plan to demonstrate biofuels on their container glass plants, with NSG also trialling biofuels on its float glass plant and refractory manufacturer DSF on its ceramics site. The project will also develop a detailed economic understanding of the fuels, their availability and sustainability, as well as their compatibility with carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies. The fuels demonstrated within this project have the potential to help the UK achieve net zero 2050 targets, providing a route to decarbonise existing furnaces/kilns and providing solutions to off-cluster manufacturing sites, where the costs to develop the necessary infrastructure to provide other low-carbon fuels (such as hydrogen, electricity) could be prohibitively high. Green Distilleries programme It is estimated that there are more than 300 distilleries across the UK. The most energy- intensive part of the distillation industry is whisky distilleries (around 7x more energy intensive than gin distilleries), which directly produce around 500,000 tCO 2 e/yr. The majority of these emissions come from the generation of heat for the distillation process, which accounts for 70% of the distillation industry’s energy demand. Around 60% of the energy used to produce heat is from natural gas; however, due