Clean Energy Transition Institute Researcher Ruby Moore-Bloom and Research Fellow Claire Buysse have been researching how to decarbonize industrial emissions in Washington state for the past five months. This effort builds upon work we did with SEI-US last summer for Washington’s Department of Commerce examining the state’s industrial emissions. We are excited to share the fruits of these efforts with you, as well as a few updates about other programs.

Washington Manufacturing Sector Overviews

We have produced analyses for six Washington state manufacturing sectors—aluminum, concrete and cement, iron and steel, glass, pulp and paper, and wood products—which each include:

1. A summary of the sector’s greenhouse gas footprint, industrial process, and workforce in Washington;
2. A flowchart depicting how the industry’s emissions are produced and could be decarbonized; and
3. A U.S. Department of Energy graphic that maps the sector’s emissions as well as energy supply, demand, and losses.

These materials orient us to the specific decarbonization challenges and opportunities that each sector faces and help inform conversations that Washington policymakers have been having about industrial sector decarbonization since the release of the 2021 State Energy Strategy. Highlights include:

• Aluminum is an increasingly important material for clean energy technologies. It is infinitely recyclable, but the limited availability of scrap metal may not be able to meet growing demand.
• Similarly, already high recycling rates and growing steel demand mean that increased recycling has a limited role in decarbonizing the iron and steel sector and must be paired with other strategies that focus on the production process.
• Glass is another energy-intensive material that is critical for clean energy technologies. Decarbonization pathways will include a combination of fuel-switching, electrification, waste heat recovery, and material efficiency strategies.
• Cement production is responsible for approximately 7% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and emissions from the chemical production process are technically challenging to reduce. Therefore, material efficiency and carbon capture, utilization, and storage will likely be crucial decarbonization strategies for the concrete and cement sector.
• Pulp and paper is Washington’s highest emitting industry and supports over 7,000 workers. Over 80% of the energy consumed by the pulp and paper industry comes from boiler fuel, largely to produce process steam, which makes energy efficiency improvements for steam systems the most significant opportunities for energy savings and emissions reductions.
• Wood product manufacturing, which employs over 12,000 workers in Washington, is less energy-intensive than steel and concrete. This is due in part to its lower heat requirements, which means that electrification is a more viable near-term decarbonization strategy than for industrial processes that require high temperatures.

Please check out our Clean Materials Manufacturing project and share your feedback and questions.

‍The Northwest Clean Energy Atlas

We thank the many CETI community members who have engaged so thoroughly with our Northwest Clean Energy Atlas. We have received excellent questions, comments, and suggestions for how to make this tool as useful as possible. Keep it coming!

We are launching a new blog series on ways to understand what the Atlas data tell us about the Northwest’s energy systems. The first post takes a deep dive on the two industrial emissions maps, exploring the underlying dataset to understand the difference between process and stationary combustion emissions; where biogenic carbon dioxide emissions show up in the visualizations; and how to use the two maps side-by-side.

If you have suggestions for future topics, please let us know.

‍May Presentations

We gave three presentations in May, which you can access now on the website. A May 3, 2022 guest lecture at Western Washington University’s Institute of Energy Studies provided students with an overview of Washington’s climate and clean energy policies since 2019 and their relationship to the state’s strategies for reducing emissions between now and 2030.  

This May 11 presentation provided CETI’s Research Fellows an overview of the deep decarbonization pathways studies that CETI has commissioned with Evolved Energy Research since 2018, describing the scenarios modeled and lessons learned about the Northwest as a region, and Washington, Oregon, and Montana individually.

On May 24 we were back at Western Washington University’s Institute of Energy Studies to talk about developing a clean energy workforce. We reviewed a variety of clean energy job growth studies, discussed challenges with clean energy job projection, and described the imperative to intentionally direct clean energy economic opportunity to historically excluded communities.

‍Looking Ahead

Our focus over the next several months will turn to the critical issue of equitable decarbonization in Northwest rural communities. In collaboration with Research Fellow Mariah Caballero, we are finalizing a report on equitable building decarbonization that centers the perspectives, expertise, and needs of these communities in accelerating decarbonization in Washington state.

We are also finishing our first video as part of the Claiming Power project, a storytelling initiative that aims to put a human face on the energy transformation in rural communities. We are very excited to share this important work with you over the summer.