Research seminar:
A novel market potential assessment for adoption of industrial decarbonisation concepts
Globally, industry produces 28% of greenhouse gas emissions. The industrial sector is also at the core of developing low-carbon technological solutions and transformational infrastructure needed to decarbonise other sectors like power, buildings, and transport. Achieving the Paris Agreement and the UK’s 2050 Net Zero target cannot be reached without decarbonizing industrial activities.
Even though pathways comprising several demonstrated concepts such as advanced energy and material efficiency, switching to alternative fuels and feedstocks, carbon capture utilisation and storage, and greenhouse gas removal technologies have been synthesised to support industrial decarbonisation, uptake of these concepts by industry remains low due to high costs and loss of competitiveness. Previous research applies techno-economic analysis to determine the economic viability of integrating industrial decarbonisation concepts into an industrial site; however, the size of a market cannot be leveraged to generate sufficient demand to reduce costs and assess uptake based on several interventions via policy and business models using techno-economic analysis. Demand and associated manufacturing volume increases are projected to deliver capital cost reductions due to increasing automation, learning and economies of scale, and sufficient interventions are required to generate and sustain demand until the concepts are market driven.
This talk presents a novel simulation and optimisation-based market potential framework to support uptake of industrial decarbonisation concepts. Several case studies are presented to illustrate the methodology. The first case study considers uptake of hydrogen fuel for energy provision in the UK chemical industry (market comprises of 479 boilers and 116 CHPs), the second case study considers fuel switching to biogas and technology switching to solid oxide fuel cells in the European waste water treatment plants (market comprises of 6181 plants in 27 European countries), and the third considers carbon capture and storage in iron and steel plants globally (market comprises of 400 plants in 44 countries).
Biography:
Dr Gbemi Oluleye is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Centre for Environmental Policy and a member of the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering with over 15 years combined experience in academia and the process industry. Her research is centred on developing frameworks to support adoption of low-to-Zero carbon innovations for industrial systems (comprising industrial processes and their associated energy systems for a plant, site, or cluster). She has worked as the lead researcher in a range of projects in both academia and industry, covering advanced waste heat recovery in the energy intensive industry, efficient energy integrated solutions for manufacturing industries, integration of renewable energy in industry, hierarchical ordering of decarbonisation measures for some foundation industries, exploiting business models to support technology adoption, fabric integrated thermal storage for low carbon dwellings, quantifying distributed energy potential for the UK, commercialisation of low carbon technologies like solid oxide fuel cells in Europe, emerging strategies for decarbonising energy intensive industries, and renewable gas production in Europe, and globally.
About Energy Futures Lab
Energy Futures Lab is one of seven Global Institutes at Imperial College London. The institute was established to address global energy challenges by identifying and leading new opportunities to serve industry, government and society at large through high quality research, evidence and advocacy for positive change. The institute aims to promote energy innovation and advance systemic solutions for a sustainable energy future by bringing together the science, engineering and policy expertise at Imperial and fostering collaboration with a wide variety of external partners.