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AVI SCHULTZ: Good morning. Thank you. Thank you, Ali Zaidi. I really appreciate those inspiring remarks. And let me first actually start off by saying, of course, I failed to introduce myself at the beginning of this workshop. I am Avi Schultz. I am the director of the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. And I’m really, really excited to be here to talk about the future of industrial decarbonization work at the Department of Energy and, of course, broadly speaking, for the entire U.S. government and for the country.So, before we turn it over to an introductory panel to dive a little bit deeper into what we’re doing in DOE and how we’re leveraging our expertise in DOE to enable industrial decarbonization, I thought it would be helpful to spend a few minutes overviewing really where DOE is today in terms of industrial decarbonization work. Of course, so much has changed with the historic new investments that we’ve received from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. That has really made a difference in what we’re able to do in DOE.

And I’ll say that I’ve been in DOE for a little bit more than 10 years now, about 10.5 years. And DOE today looks entirely different from the DOE that I joined about 10 years ago. So, I thought it would be helpful to help everyone here understand where we are in DOE today. And let me start off by saying, while we have a lot of offices working on industrial decarbonization—and I’ll talk a little bit about what that looks like in a minute—we are highly coordinated within the department through what we call a Joint Strategies team, particularly the Industrial Technologies Joint Strategies team, which is chartered directly by the Secretary and Deputy Secretary in the department, giving us the mission to develop a coordinated strategy. We’ll develop a strategy for the country, coordinate that with all of the offices that have activities and equities in that space, and then engaging externally in a single coordinated fashion. This workshop is exactly an example of that effort. So, while we and IEDO—we’re taking the lead on this specific effort, this is building very closely off of previous efforts, including the Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap, the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff, reports on industrial decarbonization.

And we have representatives from all of the offices involved in this effort here attending the workshop today. And this really is a strategy that we’re going to be talking about for all of DOE. What this Joint Strategy team is really focused on is developing that strategy and then turning it into execution. So, how do we leverage what we’re working on in this strategy? How do we map out what we need to do as a country in terms of the technology, research, development, deployment, and adoption of all of these technologies? And how do we actually translate those into things that are actually going to make a difference in terms of how DOE operates and what we’re doing?

So, multiyear program plans, our funding opportunities, the actual projects that we’re selecting, the execution and monitoring and coordination of those projects—all of that is being informed by the strategy we’re developing through this Joint Strategy team and this high-level DOE coordination. So, what are we coordinating? So, I mentioned that DOE looks very different than where I started about 10 years ago. And the way I always think about that is, when I first started at DOE, we spent a lot of time thinking about valleys of death.

It was kind of ingrained in the culture of DOE that, well, we’re really good at funding research and development. We’re really good at funding analysis. We have these tools that we can use to help support and accelerate activity in the private sector. But we don’t really have the tools or funds available to directly encourage and support deployment and large-scale demonstrations. And so, we had to be really, really clever in thinking about new programs that could get a lot of those activities a little bit indirectly.

That’s an entirely different story today, of course. So, what I really like to show on this slide, we now have offices in the Department of Energy that touch every single one of these steps of technology development and deployment through to full adoption of these technologies. And we have really clear lanes and areas that these offices can work on. So, we have offices, like IEDO and the other technology offices, that have the core subject-matter expertise in the specific technologies that we need to deploy. Of course, for IEDO, that’s in the industrial technologies for decarbonization.

And then we work really closely with our colleagues in the Office of Science on the early technology and on the early discovery side to discover what is out there that can be developed for the goals that we’re setting out for the actual applications. And then we’re working really closely with our colleagues in the OCED (the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations), MESC (the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains), and the Loan Programs Office to actually shepherd those technologies through the full piloting and validation, large-scale demonstrations, and actual deployment to the market.

And then that’s where we, again, on the other side of that, work closely with our colleagues in those demonstration deployment offices to utilize the resources that we’ve been developing in the technology offices on technical expertise. So, using the analysis, the partnerships, the resources that we develop and having that core technical expertise, and working with those offices to understand how we can accelerate adoption of these technologies. We also, of course, work closely horizontally across the different technology areas. While we are the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office, we are not the only office that is relevant to industrial decarbonization.

In the Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap that we released a little bit less than 2 years ago now, we laid out four pillars that are really going to be needed to the cover the technologies that are going to be needed for industrial decarbonization. This slide is showing those four pillars in addition to a fifth pillar, the manufacturing technology that underlies all of those new technologies that we’re going to need to develop and deploy and commercialize. And we’re working closely with these other applied technology offices, as well as the Office of Science and ARPA-E in a coordination mechanism that we’ve been calling TIEReD (Technologies for Industrial Emissions Reduction Development program).

So, we’re working very closely with our sister office, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technology Office (or AMMTO) on the manufacturing technologies that we need to develop; offices like nuclear energy, bioenergy, hydrogen and fuel cells, solar; and then the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management on the carbon capture and utilization side. And then, of course, we’re working very closely, as I mentioned, coordinating with the demonstration deployment programs: OCED, LPO, MESC, and others. And in order to … I mentioned that part of the role of this coordination is having a coordinated external-facing engagement mechanism.

And one of the key ways we’ve done that is by putting all of the resources from all of these offices up in a single point on our website on energy.gov. So, the website there, energy.gov/industrial-technologies, is a single point where everyone can go to find all of the work that’s being done by all of these offices. So while I’ve spent a few minutes here talking about internal DOE bureaucracy and org. charts, you don’t need to understand any of that to understand what we’re doing and what opportunities we have available for the folks working in the industrial sector.

To give just a couple of examples of what we’re actually executing through these programs, on the TIEReD side—so the applied technology offices and science side—one of the really important initiatives that we’ve launched is what we call our Energy Earthshots™, which are all of DOE efforts to coordinate work across … It spans across technology offices to make sure that we are all rowing in the same direction, making sure that our research and development efforts are all really geared towards those really tough problems that we need to coordinate to solve.

In the industrial decarbonization space, there are two of the eight Earthshots in particular that really touch what we’re working on. One, the first is the Industrial Heat Shot™ that’s really focused on developing technologies and commercializing those technologies by 2035 that are going to enable 85% reduction in CO₂ emissions from industrial process heating. And so, in particular, what we’re focused in that effort is through three thrusts: electrification of heating, integration of low-emissions heat sources, as well as innovative low- or no-heat technologies.

And then the second Energy Earthshot that is really bringing together a lot of our industrial decarbonization efforts is the Clean Fuels and Products Shot™. And this effort is really focused on decarbonizing the feedstocks that are required for the chemical sector, particularly the organic chemicals manufacturing sector. And so, there are two specific avenues of work that are being pursued through the Clean Fuels and Products Shot: mobilizing renewable carbon resources, where we’re working closely with our colleagues in bioenergy; and then carbon-efficient conversion technologies.

And of course, as Ali mentioned just a few minutes ago, we’re really, really excited on the demonstration and deployment program side to have some really, really big announcements that we just came out with in DOE around the Industrial Demonstrations Program. So this is a huge, huge effort. And I’m sure you’ll hear more about this on our next panel as well about covering a $20 billion total investment, including cost share, enabled by $6 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for large-scale demonstrations of transformational industrial technologies.

And then in addition, of course, we recently announced a few months ago the clean hydrogen hubs, which of course are also going to be integrally essential to ensuring that we have hydrogen as a key low carbon feedstock for input into the industrial sector. So, with that, let me now turn it over to our next panel. And I’m going to introduce our moderator and our honored speakers that we have today. And so, I’d like to start out by introducing our moderator. We’re really excited to have another representative of the White House here with us today, Andres Clarens, who’s the assistant director of industrial decarbonization from OSTP (the Office of Science and Technology Policy). And he’ll be having a brief conversation with two senior representatives of DOE: first, our deputy secretary, David Turk, who we’re really, really excited to have with us today, as well as Carolyn Snyder, our deputy assistant secretary for buildings and industry. So, with that, let me introduce Andres, Deputy Secretary Turk, and Carolyn up on stage.

ANDRES CLARENS: Good morning. Deputy Secretary Turk, I’m going to start with you. We heard a moment ago from National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi about how this is a critical moment and that we are going to have a difficult time achieving our 2050 decarbonization goals if we’re not able to make some progress on the industrial sector. And so I’d love it if you could start us off by talking a little bit about how DOE is thinking about this moment and decarbonizing the industrial space.

DAVID TURK: Let me just start, Andre, with a big thanks for you coming to join the team over at the White House at OSTP. And great that you all heard from Ali Zaidi, who’s always a tough act to follow, and incredible passion and commitment to what we’re all trying to do. And I have to thank our own DOE team as well. Carolyn’s been such a phenomenal champion and leader in our department, and Avi, I’ve had a chance to work with several times in my career, and just an incredible partner, Carolyn, with you and with the rest of the team. So, thanks to our DOE team for stepping up at this critical moment.

I think this is such a—it’s a challenge, but there’s a real opportunity for all of us here. I don’t need to get into the 38% of our overall emissions come from a variety of industrial technologies. You all know that. You’re all living and breathing that. And I also don’t need to use the word hard to decarbonize or harder to decarbonize. To me, when you say words like that, all it means is we need to do everything we can with every passing day because it’s not going to solve itself. And we just need to do the hard work from the government side, from the industry side, and work in intense partnership going forward.

As I think of this space, it’s both diverse, but we’ve also been optimizing for literally generations in terms of our industrial processes. The challenge, of course, is we’ve optimized for a certain set of factors, and now, we need to reoptimize, we need to think differently to make sure we’re avoiding carbon emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions. So, I know it would have been better if we would have optimized at the start to take that into account. But that’s just not how history and how everything worked.

I also know it’s going to come down to an awful lot of people stepping up, making careers in this space. Whether you’re working in the government, whether you’re working in industry, whether you’re working in academia, or other stakeholders, we’re going to need a lot of folks putting their sweat and ingenuity into what we need to get done. And so, I just wanted to start this session, this panel, with a big thanks for all of you making your career choices to be part of this team.

That’s what this whole spirit is about with this new analysis, this new report that we’re trying to put together to figure out how we can work hand in hand, put some pathways together. And then, of course, everything in life is execution. I know we’ll get into that as well.

ANDRES CLARENS: Great. And I just want to say that, about 2 years ago, I was at a conference of all the university and energy institute leaders. And you basically said, we need you to come and help us execute on this and come take some time in the government. And here I am. So it’s exciting to be sharing a stage with you.

DAVID TURK: It worked. Someone listened to me.

ANDRES CLARENS: It works. That pitch works.

DAVID TURK: I’ve been deputy secretary now for 3 years and now have proof that one person listen to me during that time. That’s great.

ANDRES CLARENS: It can happen to one of you. So, Deputy Assistant Secretary Snyder, I’d like to ask you the question of how the U.S. industrial sector meets this moment that Ali Zaidi talked about.

CAROLYN SNYDER: Thanks. I want to focus our attention in the next 2 days on a really humbling finding from our recent analysis. And it’s consistent with other IEA and other analysis. Which is the emission reductions that we need to achieve across the industrial sectors, as you all know—a very diverse space that you represent—more than 60% of those emissions reductions are from technologies that are either earlier stage in the innovation process or still in the minds of potentially people in this room.

And as much as we are going to continue to celebrate the historic investments that Avi called out earlier and work together, as the deputy secretary said, to be get the most we can out of that public investment, and it’s a remarkable moment of history, we also need to look forward and really focus ourselves on: How are we going to get those large emissions reductions? Where are the innovations going to come from? How do we need to be working together in new and different ways?

Avi showed that we mean it in saying, it’s an all of federal government approach. Apologies for our acronym soup. We just couldn’t do it. We’re DOE we got to put all the org charts up there. But it’s one of the elements where, under the deputy secretaries leadership and support for this space, we were able to create an entire office focused solely on industrial efficiency and decarbonization. It built off the strength of history from our industrial technologies office and advanced manufacturing office.

But as Avi was walking through those different elements, we have an office now centered in that innovation challenge, working on, yes, efficiency and electrification. But then partnering with our supply side offices, as Avi walked through, carbon management. And then also the foundational science and materials and manufacturing work done by our Office of Science and our Advanced Material and Manufacturing Technologies Office. So we really do mean it when we say, it’s an all of DOE approach. But it really needs to be an all of the United States approach.

And that’s why the people in this room, the organizations you represent … One of my hopes is we’ve got a new version of that framework that works for all of us. We’re you see yourself driving that innovation that’s needed to achieve those ambitious 2050 goals. And I also want to call out the fact that in addition to the historic deployment funding, the agency continues to do historic funding in innovation as well. We estimate around $1 billion a year through our annual funding is going to industrial decarbonization innovation, as Avi represented up there. In our IEDO office alone, we funded $500 million of new research in the last 2 years that directly came from our work with many of you on the Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap.

So, when you think about these daunting challenges ahead, know that the resources are there and we continue to get support to drive both the deployment challenges of today, accelerating commercialization. But also the innovation and science that you are dreaming in your head and that you’re working on in your organizations.

ANDRES CLARENS: Great. Thank you. Deputy Secretary Turk, I’d like to focus for a moment on the 40% of emissions that are more near-term because we just heard about the innovation pipeline and how DOE is thinking about that. How is DOE thinking about the opportunities for decarbonization that are more immediate?

DAVID TURK: Yeah, so I’m going to be really direct and clear. We are in the midst of a grand experiment in our country right now. And I’m not sure we’ve ever tried what we’re trying to do with the demonstration side. We obviously need to keep focusing on the innovation piece. We need to keep focusing on all the levers Carolyn was talking about. But if we’re going to make progress on our decarbonization path, as well as doing the kinds of things in terms of revitalizing manufacturing in our communities that President Biden has spoken about, we’re going to just need to do things differently.

And I like to call this the clean energy industrial strategy that we’re trying to execute on. The volume of the funding that we’ve got for some of these demonstration programs, some of the loan programs, some of the tax incentives is just far and away above and beyond anything that we’ve had before. Certainly in recent times over the last few generations. So Avi got into some of the numbers. We announced $6 billion—that’s billion with a B—for a variety of demonstration programs, industrial demonstration programs all across the country.

I’ve had a chance to visit a few of those. I was in Kentucky a few weeks ago visiting a copper recycler. And just super impressive, not only to see what they’re going to be doing in that particular facility, but what that means for the community in Kentucky in which that facility is located. And not only the leadership of the company, but the workers in that company. And this is going to make them—the thing that I took away from that—I think this is true for a lot of these other programs and efforts that we’re supporting—is this not only reducing emissions—and it is reducing emissions significantly.

It’s putting that company and that employer on a pathway for success for generations. Now, that’s not assured. Nothing’s assured in the private sector. A lot more work needs to go in going forward from the private sector, and certainly from the government side. But that’s just huge. And we’ve not done that before. We certainly at the Department of Energy have not had $6 billion to do demonstration programs for industrial decarb. That’s just not what we’ve had in our tool belt. And that’s just one example.

I’ve mentioned the $7 billion that’s going for hydrogen hubs. That’s a big amount of money going to hydrogen hubs across the country. There’s other funding going for hydrogen, including on the demand creation side. We just announced four billion or so dollars. We’ve got $10 billion total for something called 48C, for those who are following that. That’s a tax credit, but it operates more like a grant. And I can go on and on. For this experiment to be successful, we’re going to need to have intensive conversations and intensive partnerships.

We’re not going to do industrial strategy like the old Soviet Union did it, or what China is doing it. We’re not going to have 5-year plans where someone as smart as Carolyn is, as smart as Avi is, as smart as Andres is—this is not going to be a D.C., like we know everything and everybody just needs to step in line and salute. What this is going to be successful is if we’re listening to folks who are doing this in the real world. And I’m not just talking the C-suite folks; I’m talking the actual people who are doing things in the real in the real world.

And we need to have that guidance. We need to have that direction. We need to have that feedback all along. So that when you as taxpayers, and your friends, your families invest money in America, we need to channel that. We need to get the very most out of all those tools that we’ve been given on that front. So this is a grand experiment. It’s only going to be successful if we all have incredibly candid, real world actionable conversations. And certainly, our job from the government side is to listen, to change, to reflect, to make sure we’re getting the very most out of this phenomenal opportunity that we’ve all been given.

ANDRES CLARENS: Great. Thank you. I just want to follow up on some of the remarks you just made and ask how DOE is thinking about bridging the divide between the immediate opportunities and the large scale demonstrations for those that are in labs thinking about innovation. It can be daunting to think about these OCED announcements that are very large. And so how’s DOE thinking about bridging that divide?

DAVID TURK: Yeah, I guess the way I think of it is very organizational. One of my favorite founding fathers—I think my favorite founding father was James Madison, who was the architect of the Constitution and tried to figure out: How do you channel individual incentives of people—not just companies, or individuals, or government agencies, but individuals in government—so that we get the most out of all the phenomenal ingenuity? All this creativity, all this innovation that makes our country so strong and such a leader for years and years and years and years to come—or decades to come, I’d like to think. And quite confident in that regard.

And so, I think what we need to do, first and foremost, in the government is get our own act together. We need to be synced up. Carolyn’s leadership, Avi’s leadership is incredibly important. You mentioned OCED. We could give a whole acronym soup of GDO and SCEF and ERE and any number of other parts of our organization. The important part, and Carolyn mentioned this, is we are trying to make sure we’re all synced up as a DOE team. So we created something.

We’re not making a lot of headlines about this. A Joint Strategy team, specifically on industrial technologies, on industrial decarb to make sure—I don’t know. Carolyn, you might know how many offices are part of that Joint Strategy team. It’s a lot.

CAROLYN SNYDER: It’s most of DOE.

DAVID TURK: It’s most of DOE. And I think it ends up being about 60 or 80 point people, but all with some accountability, with some organizational coherence to it. So, we need to do that in DEO just to make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand’s doing on the innovation side, on the demonstration side. It’s all furthering a common objective. We also need to do that across the government. With White House leadership, of course, we need to work with the Department of Commerce, and Transportation, and Department of Defense, you name it. That is incredibly, incredibly difficult.

Taking a turn in government, working in the interagency is incredibly challenging, incredibly difficult. But if we’re going to do industrial strategy and we’re putting out all this money for demonstration programs, we better have a really well thought through and coherent trade policy. So, we need to work with U.S.TR, we need to work with Treasury, we need to work with the full flotilla. You’ll hear from the president later today announcing some 301 tariff adjustments.

Instead of just putting tariffs on everything, you’ll see that our approach, our strategy is being very thoughtful industry by industry, sector by sector. What’s it going to take in order to get our industry where it needs to be to producing and working with our allies around the world as well? So, we need to have our own DOE act together. We need to have the interagency act together. And then even more importantly, we need to have the public-private, the private-public. What are we doing again to support you all, your ingenuity full all along? And adjusting all along as well because no matter how good the plan is, no matter how good this pathways report is going to be, we’re going to need to make adjustments. We’re going to need to learn as we go along. And again, we’ve done this. This is how we’ve operated. But we just need to do it more intensively, all of those partnerships going forward.

ANDRES CLARENS: That’s great. Before coming to the White House, I was a professor at the University of Virginia, and I believe you’re an alumni. And we’re contractually not allowed to say that Jefferson is not our favorite founding father. So we’ll circle back on that later.

[LAUGHTER]

DAVID TURK: Jefferson’s pretty good, too. Washington was good, too. Hamilton gets a lot of press these days.

ANDRES CLARENS: Yeah. Dr. Snyder, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about where you see gaps in that innovation pipeline for industrial decarb.

CAROLYN SNYDER: Thanks. So, as Avi mentioned, and many of you were part of this, the DOE decarbonization roadmap really has been something that many of you were involved in creating. And has served as that foundational framework behind what the deputy was talking about. It’s not a single office framework. It’s really become our national framework of how we’re talking about and approaching these problems. Avi showed that different Earthshots, which are incredibly exciting.

Again, they have followed from the insights in the Earthshot—I mean, in the roadmap, very clear that those four key pillars of strategies continue to be the most important opportunities that we need to focus on. So from a perspective of earlier conversations, your feedback is incredibly impactful. Our conversations are impactful. Our entire office structure of IEDO came from the roadmap itself. So, those of you who worked on that with us, thank you. It inspired several Earthshots, an entire new office, and our research since then.

But it’s really clear that there is so much more we don’t know. I think of the roadmap and the other research, or the commercial liftoff reports as well, as this kind of landscape foundation to then have a sophisticated conversation about exactly what the Deputy just said. What we don’t know. And I’m so excited about the RFI that we released this morning and the structure of these two workshops. Our focus has been to gather what people think we know so far and to provide new structures for us to be able to hear from you and for us to work together on what we mean by the word pathways.

So, I’d love to take a minute to explain that word because everyone uses it in lots of different ways. What became really clear to us in our conversations with you and many across industry, so there’s no single answer to any subsector. There’s no single answer to any subsector in any single region. There are a series of decisions that you’re going to be making inside your facilities, across your companies that researchers and innovators are going to be making across the country that need to be unpacked because there are long timelines for many of these investments. There are large capital infrastructure investments involved and coincident transformations in our system, a lot of the amazing infrastructure investments that the deputy was just talking about. So, this vision study is not a study. It’s not a report to sit on a shelf. It’s … How do we work together to create those analytical structures, those data structures, so that you can have data-informed decision making along that time series? And it’s really challenging. And that’s exactly what we want to talk about today. And it’s not just today and tomorrow. In the coming months with you, how do we grapple with those really tough challenges? When do you need to look forward and say, you know what? That is not a no-regrets investment. I need to now appreciate that there’s a fork in the road in my decision making for my facility or for my industry. And how do I have data-informed decision making to know which pathway we’re going down? How do we prioritize the funding that we’re investing federally? How do you prioritize the funding that you’re investing in your own company? How are we looking at the right metrics to have that conversation?

The inspiration today was a conversation around climate and greenhouse gas emissions. But we know that is not the only or even the prime optimization framework you’re looking at. We’re looking at competitiveness. We want American companies to grow. We want to add high-quality jobs in our country. We also want to acknowledge the environmental impacts and public health impacts that our industrial systems have on communities and on Americans and on the global community.

We need to look at what the national security implications will be, what the supply chain implications will be, what the economic benefits could be to communities and to states. So, all of that seems like a lot and a daunting task. But in conversations with many of you and our best minds in the national labs, who are represented here today, we’ve been working on finding ways to structure that conversation so it’s manageable. The conversation’s manageable. The task ahead is remarkable. And that’s what we want to talk about with you.

We also want to hear from you in the next 2 days. Carolyn, we get the inspiration point, but what you’re doing is not helpful. That’s not how we think about it. That’s not how we approach it. I totally don’t agree with your vision for the cement industry. No, it’s not those four things. It’s this one and that one. And it’s going to be driven by completely different drivers, the barriers. Yeah, the ones you listed are great, but these are the ones we’re really focused on.

Don’t be shy. Please tell us we’re wrong. Tell us we’re asking the wrong questions, or tell us what’s most useful to you. We need to have that conversation. As the deputy said, we don’t have the answers, but we know we all need to work together to make the best decisions we can because the clock is ticking and time is running out. And if we do it right, we create a remarkable economic opportunity for our country. It’s not just a climate vision I think about. It’s what our country does for our own citizens, but also for global citizens, if we are able to make these investments in a strategic way in the coming decades.

DAVID TURK: Can I just come in there real quick? I think Carolyn just put it incredibly well about the way we do things and need to do things in the U.S. And I think it’s such a contrast to our main competitor right now, economic competitor in the world, and how China does things, just to be very clear and explicit. The fact that we actually can have good back and forth, and someone who’s in the government, we not only want you all to tell us when we’re doing things great, that’s fine. But especially to tell us when we’re not doing things right. You know what I mean?

You guys know the industry in and out, whether it’s cement or steel or you name it. And if we do something or say something that’s like, well, that doesn’t seem right. That’s not going to work in the real world. We need that feedback. In fact, the only way this whole thing succeeds in an American context is to have that very candid back and forth going on. And we make adjustments and we improve and we learn. I’m not sure that same feedback cycle is built into the way China does things in terms of, oh, if the party leader says something, everybody just has to say, yeah, that’s right, even if it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

So I think that’s our secret weapon, if you want to think about it, or our hidden talent. And we just need to lean in and really live up to all our roles in that way.

CAROLYN SNYDER: One piece I would jump on from that as well is, and Adi had this in his slide, and people use different words, accelerating deployment, market transformation. But I love the partnership component of our portfolio as well. Because that’s where you get the brutal feedback of whether we’re being helpful or not. And so for those of you who participate in are Better Plants Program, our Better Climate Challenge, our Industrial Assessment Centers, our Onsite Energy Taps, they’re a critical part of our portfolio of getting that real-world feedback of, what are the challenges you’re facing? How can we be helpful?

And then how do we take those insights of barriers up the innovation chain? So thank you for that as well. And I think that’s another example of how we approach government very differently than other countries.

ANDRES CLARENS: That was great. Thank you so much. I’d like to ask you how—what you think the industrial sector is going to look like in 2050. Because the discussion we just had, thinking about outside fence line of facilities, thinking about the larger international implications of industrial decarbonization, and how it relates to our trade partners, and so on, was really fascinating. And I think you guys made some really compelling points.

But I think now we have to think forward in time. And what changes do you anticipate coming? And how will the industrial sector look when we are at net zero at midcentury?

DAVID TURK: Yeah, first of all, we just don’t have that much time. We are talking about what we’re going to do in next year and 5 years and 10 years. The goal that President Biden has put on the table, the challenge that’s been put on the table in front of all of us is to get to net zero by 2050. I’m not sure I have—so 2050. If 2024, that’s 26 years—26 years ago, I still don’t think I had hair.

[LAUGHTER]

So, 26 years is not that long a period of time. And so, we need to transform in very significant ways. Now, maybe some industries, there’s a drop in fuel that works. Maybe other industries, if we’re going to be true and get to the net zero, it’s going to require a very fundamental way of doing things. And I know it’s challenging for those who have worked decades in an industry to optimize for a certain set of requirements that we’re now saying, “Wait a minute. To save our planet for our kids and our grandkids and to avoid all the worst consequences of climate change, we need to readjust. And we need to really put a priority on the decarbonization piece.”

And what we’re seeing all around us in terms of the harms coming from CO₂ already … We have 17 national labs that’s been mentioned several times. There may be some folks here from some of our national labs. One of our national labs recently did an analysis of hurricanes and the wind speed and how quickly they’re developing and found out that, well, we’re probably going to need a Class 6 hurricane rating because Class 5 is not going to be enough. That should cause all of us to say, “Holy crap. We need to work with some urgency and get our acts together.”

So, the thing that I’m … If we’re successful, and we need to be successful, even with AI and other kinds of things, it’s going to be a lot of people showing up day in and day out, working it, being problem solvers, whether from the engineering side, from the finance side. Even lawyers have a role here, as someone who actually went to UVA for law and just had my reunion this past weekend. We’re going to need all sorts of folks just stepping up day in and day out and making it work. And I’d like to see an industry that is at the cutting edge, is pushing the boundaries, is stepping up and proud of what you’re all doing.

There’s nothing more … And the President speaks about the dignity of a job. I think a lot of that dignity is coming home, looking your kids in the face and saying that you did something today, and yesterday, and you’re going to do something tomorrow that was not only good in terms of earning a paycheck and good for your company and community but good for the world as well. And I think that’s the thing that makes me most excited and proud, and what we’ll need to have from here until net zero and even beyond that.

ANDRES CLARENS: Great. Thanks. Dr. Snyder, how will industry look in 2050?

CAROLYN SNYDER: I love the deputy’s vision, and couldn’t agree more. I would also challenge ourselves—I hope we break the projections around the growth of U.S. industry. I want us to become a thriving and growing new sectors. And I think, as the deputy said, some of those will be substantial tweaks, minor tweaks to what we have today. Some will be ways of making things that we don’t even know—we can’t even imagine yet. But the clock’s ticking and time’s running.

And then also to be a major global exporter of those technologies, of that intellectual property, of being that brain trust for the globe in how we’ve achieved our goals. And then the last reflection I would share is: This is not a this or this kind of conversation. And you see the scientists up on the stage. We really resonate with the optimization function. I know there’s a lot of scientists and engineers in the room. To me, it’s a yes and challenge in front of you. It’s not: How do we decarbonize but also lose industry? Or how do we address communities but economics?

Really challenge yourself to, how do we optimize with all of those goals in mind? Because I think they can be quite aligned if we have the right innovation behind the problem.

ANDRES CLARENS: That’s great. Thanks. So to close, I’d like to ask each of you to share one word of what you hope the thought leaders that are in the room today will bring to this workshop effort over the next two days.

CAROLYN SNYDER: I’ll cheat. And I really liked when Ali said imagination. And that word really resonated with me. So, I’ll add one to his, which is pragmatic imagination. We want you thinking big and bold but grounded in the realities of today and the 26-year timeline.

DAVID TURK: So, I’m going to use the word momentum. It is incredibly challenging once you have inertia setting in and like, well, we’ve done this. This is how we do things, etc. It feels like we’ve got a lot of momentum. We’ve got a lot of momentum with all these new tools, all this new funding in the federal government, just one number for you on that. 3.5 years ago, we were projected in our country to be about at a 20% emissions reduction, greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030 off a 2005 baseline.

Now, that’s a decrease but kind of a stagnating decrease just over the last few years and certainly with the Inflation Reduction Act, the other acronym pieces of legislation that I could mention as well, and all that we’re trying to do in executing from the private sector side with leadership from the public sector side, the tax incentives, the grant programs, the loan programs, we’re now on a trajectory, if we execute, to be at least at a 40% reduction.

So, just over the last few years in terms of policy, in terms of funding, we went from a 20% emission reduction to 20, 30, to 40%. That is remarkable. That’s a remarkable amount of progress. That is a remarkable amount of momentum. We can clap for that. That’s OK. I would just urge all of us: Let’s lean into the momentum. When you have momentum, the last thing you want to do is stall that momentum. We just need to keep at it. We need to keep that momentum. We need to all do our parts and keep pushing to keep that momentum going and even building on it.

ANDRES CLARENS: Wonderful. I want to thank both of you for being here and for kicking us off this way. And I look forward to the conference and working with all of you over the next 2 days. Thanks so much.

AVI SCHULZ: Thank you so much to our panel, a really inspiring panel that we just had. Andres, Deputy Secretary Turk, Deputy Assistant Secretary Snyder, really appreciate those words and that framing for the discussion that we’re going to be having today and tomorrow. So with that, what I’d like to do next is dive into a little bit more detail of what we are actually gathered here today to discuss. So I’m going to spend a few minutes talking about the framing for this effort. Which, again, as you’ve heard today, really is going to be a foundational effort for us, certainly in IEDO, but for DOE overall. And how we’re thinking about the next steps for the country for industrial decarbonization. So, as we’ve already heard from just in the panel today, the industrial sector is beyond critical for our country—for the health of our country. Manufacturing contributes a foundational part of our economy, of our workforce, and for the functioning of every other part of our country. The challenge, of course, is we need to grow the manufacturing sector while decreasing CO₂ emissions.

As, again, everyone here is fully aware, the industrial sector represents about 38% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. So that’s a big challenge that we need to address. But we need to do that, of course, without affecting—and in fact, as Carolyn was just talking about—while in fact growing the industrial sector. And so let me be perfectly clear as I dive into my next few slides that when we talk about an a decarbonization strategy for the U.S., we are not talking about a deindustrialization strategy for the U.S.—quite the opposite. We are working on developing strategy that is going to both enable the growth that’s already projected, as well as enabling new kinds of industrial opportunities and subsectors for the country. Of course, this is a pretty big challenge. This is a challenge, as we all know, when we talk about the industrial sector, is that there isn’t really any such thing as the industrial sector. There are a whole bunch of industrial subsectors. There are also a whole bunch of different kinds of emissions sources.

There are, of course, the energy emissions directly related to activities like combustion of fossil fuels or other use of fossil carbon feedstocks. But there are, of course, the nonenergy emissions. And these come from a wide variety of sources, whether we’re talking about agricultural emissions from a variety of sources, or whether we’re talking about fundamental carbon dioxide releases from activities like cement manufacturing. And so when we talk about a strategy for industrial decarbonization, we need to talk about all of these different sources and all of these different heterogeneous manufacturing processes.

And I’ll spare you the way that I sometimes talk about this to go into a huge amount of detail of all of the different heterogeneities that exist in the industrial sector. But just to, again, reinforce what we all in this room is this slide, of course, just shows not a comprehensive, but a but a pretty long list of all of the different industrial subsectors that we’re talking about. And so this really reflects, I think, one of the key challenge that we have.

The other really key challenge that we have—systemic challenge that we have in the industrial sector is, of course, the economic challenge in terms of what kind of scale of investment we’re going to need in order to fully decarbonize the industrial sector. And so to this, we’re really, really grateful for our colleagues in the demonstration and deployment offices who recently led the effort to release this Pathway to Commercial Liftoff report, which really laid out both the challenge that we see in the industrial sector but also the near-term opportunities.

But these challenges are significant. So just for the eight industrial sectors that are particularly called out in the Inflation Reduction Act, we estimate that an investment on the scale of approximately $1 trillion is going to be needed to fully decarbonize this. But then, of course, the challenge is, as you heard from the panel just a few minutes ago, that even if we wanted to fully decarbonize and we were able to mobilize that trillion dollars right now, we don’t have all of those technologies that we’re going to need, that at least that are commercially, viable to be able to fully achieve this decarbonization.

And so again, that liftoff report really laid out the challenge in terms of saying that about 40% of emissions from the industrial sector can be achieved, can be mitigated today with available technologies. And that’s great news. In one way, that’s 40% of the challenge that we can be working on right now. But of course, that means that there’s 60% of the challenge that we can’t do right now, that we just we just don’t have the technologies. Or if we do have the technologies, technically speaking, they’re not cost effective. And that’s the same thing.

Again, I don’t need to tell folks the private sector if it’s not cost effective, that’s the same thing as saying that we don’t have them, that they’re not available to be deployed. Again, we are not asking the private sector to take the economic hit for decarbonization. So what we really, really need to do and what we’re really laying out the strategy for here today is, how do we develop those technologies? And how do we focus our efforts, both in DOE, but how do we focus the private sectors and the national laboratories and the universities efforts on those key technologies that are really going to enable the reduction of the full industrial sector?

And so the scale of this challenge really calls out for targeted investments. And I say targeted investments, again, I want to really reinforce that our strategy is not to do everything everywhere, all at once, as Joe likes to say. That’s not going to be a successful strategy. So, what we really need to do in this effort that we’re starting with all of you today is figuring out where we need to focus in our efforts so that we can actually turn this into an achievable goal for the U.S.

As was already mentioned, as already mentioned, and as we talked about just a few minutes ago on the panel, we really started this discussion with the industrial decarbonization roadmap that we released, again, just under about 2 years ago. That really laid out the scope of the technologies that we’re going to need to develop for full decarbonization. And the roadmap lays out the challenges in terms of four categories, or pillars, of technologies.

Energy efficiency … So how do we reduce the total amount of energy that we’re going to need to decarbonize?

Electrification … How do we leverage the progress that we’re making on decarbonization of the grid through the really rapid deployment of technologies like wind and solar, low-carbon fuels, feedstocks and energy sources? So how do we replace those inputs, those current fossil-based inputs into the industrial sector with low-carbon ones, either for fuel usage or for feedstocks, like what I talked about with the clean fuels and product shot? And then finally, that fourth critical pillar is carbon capture utilization and storage.

So how do we leverage technologies either for residual fuel use that we’re going to require? Or for those technologies that just fundamentally require carbon dioxide production, like conventional cement production? So we were really, really excited about releasing this Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap 2 years ago. And again, as you heard, this is not a report that just sat on a shelf in DOE, and we just kind of looked at it and patted ourselves on the back. What we did with this is said, “Wow. This is a really, really challenging program. We need to create an office that is just focused on industrial decarbonization.”

And so that led to the creation of the office that I lead, the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office, IEDO. What we really have as our mission to be that central technical resource within the department and for the country on the development of these industrial decarbonization technologies. And we meet this mission that’s laid out on the slide through three primary thrusts in our activities, or three teams that we’ve organized. The first is our Energy- and Emissions-Intensive Industries team. And they’re really focused on the particularly the five highest emitting subsectors that are really going to require systems-level thinking and systems-level approaches to fully decarbonized: iron and steel, chemicals, food and beverage, forest products, cement and concrete. And you’ll hear more, of course, about our thinking about these sectors as we get into the breakout sessions tomorrow. We also have a team focused specifically on the cross sector technologies. So how do we develop thermal processes and systems that are going to be required across industry? Low-carbon fuels utilization, emerging efficiency challenges. So how do we utilize progress in technologies like smart manufacturing or digital manufacturing to enable industrial load flexibility?

And then water and wastewater treatment, as well, is a key part of the industrial sector that we’re looking at in our cross-sector technologies. And then finally, the third pillar of our team is our Technical Assistance and Workforce Development team. And so you actually already heard a little bit about this in the panel just a few minutes ago from Carolyn. And I also talked a little bit about it when I talked about how we work together in offices across DOE. That the work that we have in bringing together partnerships and networks like what we have here today, but formalized through programs like our Better Plans and Better Climate Challenge, our Onsite Energy Technical Assistance Partnerships, our energy management programs.

How do we utilize that expertise that we have access to, that we’ve convened in DOE? How do we make that available to the private sector to help companies accelerate the adoption of their own, your own, energy reduction and emissions reduction goals? So this is what we work on in IEDO. And as you already heard about, while this office was created, again, less than 2 years ago, we’ve done a lot over that year and a half. So this is a little bit of an eye chart. I don’t expect you to read all of the bullets here.

But I want to emphasize that just over two years, these are announcements of actual project selection. So these aren’t just announcements of funding intention, of open solicitations. These are projects that we have actually provided funding to. And that amounts to more than half $1 billion over the last 2 years. Then in the first two bullets there, new research and development projects, there are funding opportunities. So that’s nearly 100 projects, nearly more than $300 million just in new research, development, and demonstration projects.

We had a FOA specifically focused on decarbonizing water a resource recovery facilities, a huge source of emissions from the nonmanufacturing industrial sector. We were really happy to announce the selection and renewal of two new—of a new and a renewed manufacturing U.S.A institutes. They’re our EPIXC Institute, focused on process electrification, and our RAPID Institute focused on decarbonization of chemical process industry. And then we were really excited most recently to announce the renewal of NAWI, our National Alliance for Water Innovation hub. And so they we announced that renewing them for another 5 years of work at $75 million to really focus the nation’s energy on energy-efficient and decarbonized water treatment technologies.

So what are we working on? What are the next steps? What are we here today to think about? I already talked a little bit about the roadmap that we announced 2 years ago. And that was a really, really fantastic start. You’ve already seen what’s come out of that and how that has really mobilized efforts in DOE. That roadmap, as great as it was, didn’t cover everything. It really focused specifically on six heavy-emitting subsectors and analyzed those subsectors in part and had some extrapolation in order to really scope out the technologies that we were going to need to develop.

What we’ve been working on since the roadmap is fully building out the models for those six subsectors, and then including the whole rest of industry. And when I say the whole rest of industry, that’s about half of the full energy-related emissions from the industrial sector. So what you’re going to be starting to hear about today and tomorrow is what our initial results are looking like from that expanded modeling, from our initial roadmap effort. And starting to think about, OK, now that we’ve done this full modeling, one, does this make sense? We want to hear from you again.

Does this make sense? Are we modeling these processes and these sectors in the right way? In a way that’s useful? And then, does this help us map out the path forward? And so what we really want to be working towards, as you heard Carolyn talk about a few minutes ago, is a really new holistic vision study for all of DOE that we’re talking about as the pathways for U.S. industrial transformations. And again, this really goes back to the point that I was making about prioritization. What we really want to be able to do as DOE and help all of you do is understand where we need to be putting our efforts, focusing them most effectively.

So we want to identify the cost-effective and industry-specific strategic pathways that are going to enable a thriving U.S. industrial sector with net zero greenhouse gas emissions. But we don’t want to look at that in isolation from all of the other factors that we are going to be important, including all of the technological, economic, societal, and environmental, and health impacts that are going to be associated with that huge scale and rapid-pace industrial transformation that we’re talking about. And then what we really want to get to in this effort is to be able to present and really have a discussion and an iterative feedback cycle with all of you on the strategies, the targeted pathways, the metrics, and targets we need to be laser focused on to overcome these challenges and barriers that are associated with this effort.

In other words, what we need to do is really reimagine the industrial sector of the future. And I really, really want to emphasize a point that Carolyn made earlier on this panel, which is that we know—we absolutely know that there is no single pathway to decarbonization that will work for any single industrial subsector. And so when we talk about the pathways that we need to focus on, we need to be pursuing multiple pathways in parallel for each industrial subsector. So when we think about the future of industrial facilities, we’re thinking about: How do we attack this challenge from multiple different angles? How do we think about the onsite energy technologies that are going to be required for facilities, maybe with thermal storage for some kinds of applications? How do we improve process efficiency for manufacturers to ensure that when we do deploy capital assets, we’re doing those most efficiently and not trying to take on more of an energy challenge than we need to? How do we integrate carbon capture, both onsite carbon capture technologies and carbon capture networks and CO2 transport pipelines into this vision? How do we think about this at the economy level? How do we think about circularity of the feedstocks and the materials that are going into the manufacturing sector?

So this is the conversation that we’re really excited to start today. We’re not going to complete it in two days, for sure, but we’re going to start it. And one of the things we’re really excited to announce, as of this morning—so I think Carolyn already mentioned it, but just this morning, we released a new RFI, request for information, that really is going to be following on with all of the conversations that we’re starting today in this room, but of course, opening it up to everybody in the country, anybody who wasn’t able to make it to this event today, folks who may be listening to the live stream of this on the internet, and folks who may just need a little bit more time to digest and think about what we’re talking about. We just released this RFI. It’s going to be open for about a month. But really, the conversation is going to continue for more than a month even. So we know 2 days isn’t enough. We a month isn’t enough. But we’re really, really excited to start this process of getting feedback exactly as, again, you heard from today, does this make sense what we’re proposing in terms of strategies, in terms of analysis? So with that, let me just start to the next few minutes before we take a break.

I want to take a few minutes just starting to introduce the framework that we’re using for this effort that we present in the RFI, that we’re going to talk about today. And you’ll hear a little bit more in more detail about after the break. What we really want to lay out in this effort and what we’re starting to think about is, what are the primary challenges and barriers to industrial decarbonization? And that’s the way that we believe we’re going to start to break down this challenge of, how do we retire these challenges and barriers?

So there are six primary things that we’ve called out here. Of course, there are different ways you can break this out. But these six barriers and challenges are the ways that we think it’s particularly helpful for us to address the effort in front of us: first, of course, thermal systems emissions. So how do we reduce the usage of emissions from primarily fossil fuel usage, which is about 90% of the heat provided to industrial processes today, which in turn, represents about half of all of the emissions from the industrial sector? How do we address the process emissions? So again, these are from sources like cement manufacturing, where it’s intrinsic to the industrial process that you’re talking about to release CO2, the constraints within industrial entities. So what are the structural challenges involved in either the way incentives are structured within companies, within markets, within company government interactions that limit the way zero-emission technologies can be adopted and material and energy efficiency improvements can actually be accelerated within companies?

Infrastructure … We talk about electrification as one of our primary pillars. We talk about low-carbon fuels with a focus on, of course, hydrogen and other low-carbon fuels as well. But what does that infrastructure actually going to look like? What are going to be the regional and temporal limitations on being able to access that infrastructure in a way that’s actually decarbonized to ensure that we’re not just offloading emissions from one category to another? Information flows. This is something that we can really help with in DOE. To what extent is just lack of data availability inhibiting decarbonization adoption?

This is something that’s very much in our wheelhouse that we can help with in DOE. And then, of course, critically, how do we address underrepresented social criteria? So when we talk about decarbonization, we really, really, really don’t want to make the same kinds of—I’ll say, mistakes that have been made in the past in terms of the not appreciating the impact that industrial technologies can have on wider communities. So how do we fold that in really effectively to our strategy so that we can ensure that when we talk about industrial decarbonization, the transformation of industry, we are enabling that for the betterment of everybody in the country?

So when we talk about the specific pathways that we’re focused on, what do we mean by a pathway? And a pathway is a set of specific actions needed to achieve progress in and across decarbonization pillars, while remaining informed and supplemented by RDD to advance viable solutions that will need to be adopted at scale in the marketplace. So we really want to map out what these pathways look like while taking into account, of course, the major production routes.

So what are these pathways look like in terms of production of these critical materials that are coming out of the industrial sector? How do we prioritize these pathways in terms of emissions reduction, in terms of the factors that are going to impact how facilities are going to actually evaluate these technologies? The timing of these deployments? The uncertainties, risks and barriers and the prioritization thinking about retrofits versus greenfield facilities. So these are all of the inputs, the factors that we want to be considering as we map out these pathways and really prioritize them.

And then, of course, as I mentioned before, we really want to think in this framework as we prioritize these pathways, how do we make sure we’re prioritizing them such that we’re taking into account the right metrics, the right criteria? And these criteria are going to cover both the environmental and health criteria, economic, societal and technological. So something we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re asking about in the request for information is, what are the right criteria in each of these categories for us to be using as we prioritize these pathways?

And so, of course, we know that this is intrinsically thinking about beyond the plant bounds. So in terms of environmental and health, how do we appropriately measure the direct and indirect CO2 emissions when we are in the context of this effort? How should we be layering on and quantifying the impact of criteria, air pollutants, other potentially toxic waste products? How do we evaluate the associated health impacts of different technologies, different pathways towards decarbonization?

The economics are critical here, of course. Again, what I said at the very beginning of this, we’re not talking about deindustrialization. So what we’re talking about are economically successful companies that are actually deploying these technologies. As we evaluate technologies and all these pathways, we need to understand what are the right economic criteria to use to really ensure that we’re, again, putting our investments in technologies that are going to be useful for actual deployment.

What are the right societal metrics? How do we make sure … How do we really, really ensure that we’re not having these unintended benefit, unintended impacts of societal impact? So how do we think about the metrics for equity and environmental justice, for energy costs for Americans, for ensuring that we have high quality jobs and a trained workforce for these sectors? And of course, how do we layer on national security, critical materials, and resilient supply chains into this overall industrial sector?

And then finally, we really want to think about the technological impact. So it’s, of course, not just thinking about what the overall emissions are from these technologies, but how do these actual technologies integrate with existing technologies? So we don’t want to totally recreate everything from scratch. As much as possible, we want to leverage existing capital assets, existing expertise, existing production routes to enable really as—basically, have as targeted an investment as we need so we don’t need to recreate everything from scratch. So how do we think about, what are the metrics we need to use to evaluate whether the technologies we’re investing in are really going to enable rapid adoption by industry?

The way we are thinking about this really is in terms of helping enable a clearer way for industry, for the private sector to be able to make decisions. And so as we think about decisions for sectors, for companies, for facilities, the way we naturally thought about laying this out is in terms of a decision tree. And really laying out the key choices that we need to make at each point of this decision tree, and what criteria we need to layer into this to help enable the rapid decision making so that we can fully get to the end of this decision tree, continue in an iterative process, and ensure that we’re actually going to be achieving the goal that we’re setting out for in terms of decarbonized industry.

What I’m showing on this slide is just a fairly generic version of this decision tree that, I’m sure, is probably a little bit difficult to read in this room. It’s in the RFI, it’s in the material that we’ve that we’ve provided ahead of this workshop. So please take a look at this. And what you’ll be hearing of about after the break is some more specifics of what this looks like for each sector and the way we’re mapping this out. So please take a look at that and, again, give us feedback.

So with that, I will pause. Again, strongly encourage you to take a look at the RFI. There’s more information up on all of the detail that we’re talking about. And then we will really have opportunity to dive into this and get the feedback from all of you today and tomorrow, and over the next month, over whether any of this makes sense. So with that, thank you for your attention. Not sure if we have time for questions. Maybe we can take a few minutes. Happy to take a few questions.

Everybody’s been very patient listening to a lot of talks for the last hour and a half. So let me open it up for some questions from the audience.

[Silence]

SPEAKER: How about now? Hey, there we go. I just had to be patient. I want to start off—and this isn’t a question. But this is a great example of how awesome our federal government is, that they’re willing to put money into stuff like this. And we are on a steep learning curve. I don’t know. When I sit next to people on the plane, I’m the one guy out of 20 who thinks the U.S. federal government’s a good thing. And it is. And it’s this think tank stuff that I’m excited about that’s going to help us get there.

So kudos to the directors who left and everybody else at IEDO for making this happen.

AVI SCHULZ: Thank you. I appreciate it. It’s always good to get that positive feedback. Any other questions from the audience?

MARIA CURRY NKANSAH: Hello. Maria Curry Nkansah from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. When you talk about the environment and the intersection with health impacts, how do you envision us collecting that data related to the health impacts when there’s another agency that appears to have oversight of that—of the health impacts?

AVI SCHULZ: Great question. The short answer is that we talk to those agencies often, so there are a number of other agencies. So I think Deputy Secretary Turk talked a bit about the extent to which this is a whole of government approach. And so we have strong connections with our colleagues in EPA and other agencies that are really focused on that. So what we’re really looking at doing is certainly not replicating any of that data collection in any of the analysis that’s happened in other agencies but coordinating that and putting it within the framework that we’re presenting here today, ensuring that we are thinking about it in the right way so that it is directly connected. It’s not something that’s happening over there. It’s bringing that data into our analysis and making sure that in our decision making, that is a key part of how we’re prioritizing, so explicitly laying out those metrics. And to the extent where we see gaps in the analysis, we have the resources to either work with those agencies or work with the experts that those agencies are working with in order to fund additional research to fill in those gaps.

And in all honesty, as we dive further into this and really kind of lay out the metrics that we need, the metrics that we want to prioritize, we probably will find gaps in the data. And so that’s where that’s very much in our wheelhouse, of course, in terms of funding, data collection efforts, funding research to help round out those resources.

ED RIDER: Hi. Ed Rider, independent consultant. Question: How do you push and pull a rope at the same time? So many of the technologies that are out there relative to low carbon to industry look like pushing a rope. The question is, how do you create value that’s going to inspire industry to pursue some of those low-carbon technologies where they see it’s really going to be advantageous to them, market development, new markets, competitive advantage, new properties, etc.? Just a thought question.

AVI SCHULZ: Yeah, no. That’s a great question. So I have two things that I guess I’ll emphasize in answering that. The first is that I think what you’re highlighting on is a key reason that we’re talking about pathways for the industrial sector. We’re not talking about replacing unit processes as our focus area. We’re not talking about just decarbonizing existing production routes, and that’s all we’re doing. What we’re really trying to discover and our hypothesis is, in a lot of areas, is that as we think about a fully decarbonized vision for a lot of these industrial sectors, what that likely will mean in many cases is discovering and developing entire production routes that aren’t just layering on cost to existing production routes and making those economically nonviable.

But thinking about where we can find value—in fact, create value for the private sector by, again, kind of circuiting existing production routes. This is an area in particular in the chemical sector that we’ve really focused some efforts on. Instead of just thinking about, OK, we’ve got our petroleum feedstock, we crack it into ethylene and BHT and all the other building block chemicals. How do we just figure out how do we replace—if we’re going to use, for example, CO2 as a feedstock? Well, OK, we’re just going to focus on making ethylene BTX from CO2 and just put it exactly in the same chemical feedstock.

Quite the opposite. What we really see opportunities for is, how do we jump over some of those process steps by thinking about decarbonized feedstock? So maybe new electrochemical technologies with CO2 that really can provide much higher value building blocks. Or using bio feedstocks that already have a lot of the oxygen and nitrogen embedded in those molecules. That’s really where a lot of the cost comes from, from existing petroleum feedstocks.

The second thing I’ll say is that what we’re really working to enable in the U.S. is a globally competitive industry. And so we’re seeing all of the signs globally that these market transformations are happening no matter what. We’re seeing markets develop in the U.S., in Europe, in Asia, in other countries for decarbonized materials. I’m sure there are a number of folks in the audience today who have worked on a market analysis and decarbonization plans for their companies that are happening regardless of any additional activity that’s going to—regulatory activity that’s going to come out of the U.S. government.

So those markets are moving. And what we really want to do as the U.S. Department of Energy is help U.S. industry create products that are going to be competitive in those markets globally. So that’s really what we’re focused on, and what we’re hoping to enable. So with that, I think we’re out of time. I don’t want to eat any more into the break. Thank you very much for your attention. We will reconvene at—10:30? 10:30. 10:30, we’ll reconvene with some really valuable context setting presentations for our strategy. Thank you very much.

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JOE CRESKO: All right. All right, folks. All right, everyone. Let’s try to think about working our way back to our seats so we can get started on the next session.

All right, everybody. Let’s try to get our take our seats so we can get going again. All right. Thank you very much. Great morning so far. Hands raised if you think this has been a good conversation so far. With the break, anybody get a chance to meet somebody new? If you haven’t tried that, during lunch, we really want to make sure we’re communicating across with the folks that are here.

So I really want to do a quick introduction. We’re going to have a next session on broad trends and ideas shaping industrial decarbonization. I will introduce myself. My name is Joe Cresko. I’m the chief engineer in the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. I’ll be moderating this session. We’ll really have a couple of speakers here, and then we’ll move into some remarks that I’ll have regarding some of the pathways analysis work that we’ve been doing.

But to set that up, I think this is going to be particularly interesting. And we’ll have two speakers today. We actually had three speakers, and unfortunately, Professor Benjamin Sovacool had to withdraw at the very, very last moment. Really disappointed he couldn’t get here. But we have two really great speakers. I think each might have a little bit more time then to slow down and take their time through this. It’ll be Perry Stephens from EPRI (the Electric Power Research Institute). And Dr. Lauren Ross from DOE.

And so we’ll start with Perry. I’ll ask Perry to come up now. Perry Stephens is a senior principal technical leader at EPRI. He assists utilities in the evaluation, development, and implementation of electric end-use technologies for residential, commercial, nonroad mobility, and industrial customer segments. In addition, Perry currently co-leads the end-use technical subcommittee of the low-carbon resources initiative. It’s more acronyms than DOE. LCRI, which is a collaborative effort with the GTI energy and more than 50 sponsor companies and organizations aimed at advancing low-carbon fuel pathways on an economywide basis to achieve deep decarbonization goals.

Previously, Perry worked at Duke Energy and the Timken Company as an expert in manufacturing, thermal processing, energy efficiency, energy business strategies, and engineering project management. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Perry to give some remarks. Thanks, Perry. Perry.

PERRY STEPHENS: Thanks, Joe. I’m going to try that there. Can you hear? Maybe I need to hold it? OK, I’ll hold it. Yeah, thanks. First of all, thanks for inviting us to participate today, Joe and team. Just kind of humbling with the brainpower in this room that you’d ask us to come and give you a little bit of table-setting exercise here. But that’s kind of my goal. I want to walk through some of the work that EPRI has been doing within our own team.

I’m part of an electrification program. So we look at electric technologies economywide. Everything except on road transportation within my group, and another group within EPRI takes care of that. But all nonroad transportation, all industrial and commercial applications, and buildings. We’re looking at electrification. That led us into—obviously, with our end-use focus, a lot of interest in what are the difficult to electrify end-use applications. And so we’ve been doing a lot of work in our low carbon resources initiative as well. So we’ll talk a little bit about EPRI and the LCRI initiative.

I’m going to start small and get bigger with the information I’m going to try to convey, and the work that we’ve been doing thus far. And so it’ll be a little bit granular to start with, and then we’ll expand out and talk about what the implications are of even policy matters going forward. So EPRI, over 50 years ago, got started in the great blackout—Northeast blackout. It was a big problem. Electric utilities said, we can’t solve this ourselves. It’s a multi-state, multi-utility issue. And it worked. They figured it out.

They said, you know what? We’ve got other big problems, challenges that we face. And so EPRI was formed, and we’ve been solving problems for the electric and energy industry in general since then. You can see we’re in 450 countries. We represent the generation that is represented by our members as about 90 plus percent of the generation in the U.S. And so we cover soup to nuts research from basic fundamental physics and chemistry all the way to market behaviors and everything in between.

And then our sources initiative. This is a partnership between ourselves and our sort of sister institute, the Gas Technology Institute, where we have joined forces with, as Joe mentioned, a number of parties, over 50 entities who have pooled our funding together to do research. And I want to point you to the horizontal list there: hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic and dry fuels, biofuels. These are the low-carbon resources. These are the energy carriers that will be—we have focused our attention on in low-carbon resources initiative.

And we’re looking at how they are produced, how they may be stored and delivered, how they integrate with the grid in terms of resiliency and demand response, and those sorts of things. And in my piece has been the end-use application. It’s a very broad piece of work that involves all sectors of the economy. Quite a lot of correlation and interrelationships between how those sectors will behave as we start to look at other final energy sources. And so we’re looking at all sorts of options and technology, emerging and existing technology.

And of course, our goal is to do this in an independent and comprehensive way. We have an objective to provide analysis, provide information and insights, and let the policy makers take that and do with it what they need to do to make informed decisions, as well as end-use customers. And of course, we want those to be high impact in as much as possible. And so what we’ve been doing, there’s a high-level economy-wide model, very complex. Some amazing techno-economic researchers at EPRI developed this model. It’s called U.S. region model.

And I’ll point you to the little QR code in the corner. If you can grab that. I would commend that to you to go take a look at the lowcarbonlcri.com. And there’s a net-zero analysis there that I think you’re going to want to take a look at. It’s a very comprehensive report on the analysis we’ve done for economywide modeling. That has provided the backdrop for understanding various low-carbon fuel pathways, and what those implied market clearing costs may be in our techno-economic analysis. And that’s the piece we’ve been involved with.

We want to understand the technologies at end use that would apply these low-carbon fuel pathways, or as mentioned, carbon capture and other sources of fuels, biofuels, and so on. Not only what are the costs of the fuels and how they are used within the systems—these industrial systems, and other systems—but also what is the performance from an energy efficiency standpoint, energy input standpoint? And what is the cost to either retrofit or a purpose built equipment? And then sort of play that out in terms of an economic competitive scenario, will these things adopt or not? What is the likelihood of them moving forward?

And so we look at these real-world sort of end-use applications to really develop that competitive understanding and how the market may behave. So one of those is industrial boilers. So this is usually the point where a lot of people will go to sleep. It’s like, why boilers? They’re pretty pedestrian, mundane but ubiquitous. They are everywhere. And there are a lot of them. This is, I think, an Oak Ridge study, a graphic that they produce at Oak Ridge National Labs.

And you can see that with the exception of areas where population and industrial activity are relatively low, they are very widespread, industrial boilers. And the densities are where you would expect them to be, certainly in areas of heavy industrialization. But again, pretty wide spread. And the graph on the left is the number of boilers, and on the right, is really the energy intensity, or how much energy is sort of being consumed by those boilers in their operations, of course, boilers, heat water, primarily, other fluids as well, but primarily water. And that water then is an energy carrier within the facility, either as steam or as heated water. And so we’ve done a study—completed a study on the conversion of existing gas-fired boilers to hydrogen. And we say hydrogen here. We’re not exclusive to hydrogen. There are other fuels. There are challenges with those other fuels, ammonia being one that’s certainly worthy of consideration, alcohols of different types.

So these are all sort of hydrogen-based and derived from hydrogen-based molecules. But in the end, kind of hydrogen’s the benchmark fuel gas that we work with. And so we’ve looked at all of these different boiler types. And I know there’s a bit of an eye test, but there’s a whole list of the NAICS codes for the various industrial sectors. And so I want to point you to two things on this chart. One is that—and this is the total current MMBTU per hour sort of capacity is what’s represented by the colors.

And so the darker colors on the right are the really big dogs. They’re sort of 50 million BTUs per hour and above. The interesting thing is, with the exception of a few industries, pretty much not the big opportunity here in terms of decarbonization. So we really look at 50 million BTUs and below boilers, small- to mid-sized boilers, as being the real large opportunity in terms of decarbonization. That’s good news and bad news. It may be a little bit easier to think about how you would deal with a small boiler.

But when you start to look at pathways like carbon capture, a whole bunch of small boilers doesn’t seem like the best approach, perhaps. Maybe something we could do on the larger end of the scale. So that’s one attribute of what we see about the stock of boilers today, is that it’s dominated by small- to mid-sized boilers, less than 50 million BTUs per hour. Those other boilers, the larger ones, tend to be in combined heat and power scenarios, and a few industries like petrochemical, pulp and paper, some in food processing.

And then this is the same list of NAICS codes on the left. And this is looking at those 2.5 to 50 million BTUs per hour. By the way, 2.5 is sort of a benchmark. We look at below that. It’s sort of a package boiler, fairly straightforward to think about. Either electrifying or some other sort of approach to being able to replace those. And so this is more of an appliance-type boiler in those applications. And so we sort of bookended the analysis between those 2.5 and 50 million BTUs per hour.

The main point here is that it’s kind of an even split between above 10 and below 10 million BTUs per hour, in terms of the number of boilers to work with. And so we went out and did some work with the boiler manufacturers and other equipment manufacturers in the industry. And you can see here just kind of a listing of the number of entities that we did research on. So we did a lot of internet-based research and secondary research to find these companies and find out who’s actually working in the decarbonization space and had any sort of literature or work at all going on. And what boilers did they kind of work with.

And it turns out that not that many entities are really that interested or working in decarbonization activities. They just want to make boilers and sell them. And so we did find some that are working for decarbonization and hydrogen capable boilers and other fuels. And we asked them a lot of questions regarding what kind of boilers, what size, what do they think about the future with respect to decarbonization? And so this is a kind of a summary of—kind of two chunks. On the left side here is what about blending?

So we think, we believe that there’s a pathway toward beginning to blend hydrogen within the existing natural gas networks. And that is certainly a pathway to begin to build demand for hydrogen, and be able to begin to produce hydrogen at lower cost. And so that’s sort of a first necessary step. And then what about 100% hydrogen? What about operating a boiler on 100% hydrogen? And the issues that you get into are similar, whether you’re looking at ammonia, which you might crack into hydrogen and release the nitrogen and burn it as hydrogen in the boiler. So there are different approaches to this. But in the end, what do you think about this?

And so on the left-hand side, burning a blend—even up to 30, 40, or higher blends up to 70%—most of the boiler manufacturers said, “Hey, very likely to somewhat likely that we’ll be doing that soon.” The burner manufacturers’ a little more optimistic there. They’re more involved in the technology of actually what happens in the burner with respect to hydrogen and a little more optimistic but very likely to somewhat likely. So there’s some consensus there with the folks that are working toward decarbonization of boilers, that that’s going to happen—100% hydrogen, a little different story. And it’s kind of interesting that the optimism shifts. And I think this is a function of how much work is ahead of them to make it happen, honestly, for us to make burners that are hydrogen capable for a little bit of hydrogen or a blend. The burner manufacturers feel pretty good about that. The boilers manufacturers are less sure about what that does to the rest of their systems, and they integrate. So they have a controls piece. And they’re a little more pessimistic.

When you look at the other side of the story going 100% hydrogen, the burner guys are now like, “Well, I’m not quite as sure about that. I think it’s less likely that we’re going to be doing 100% hydrogen in the near term to intermediate term.” And so this is the opinion of where the industry is right now, where the work needs to happen. To what extent will the design be affected? So this is the next sort of important question. What do you think about the design?

Again, when we look at blends, none to minor design changes required. And that’s from the valve train through the burner, even the emissions and refractory. They feel fairly confident about that. But a big shift when you start taking a look at 100% hydrogen capable boilers. There’s a lot of work that has to be done on the controls. The flame management, the flame behaves a lot differently. There are safety risks with respect to management of the flame, a phenomenon known as flashback, where the flame will actually go out, and then reignite on its own, catastrophically.

So there’s some issues there that they get more concerned about. And specifically, what are they concerned about? I can’t even read it here. So I’ll explain to you what we’re seeing here. In the center, we have a couple of categories of concern. And one is the turndown capability. So when we look at hydrogen, we know boilers have some phenomenon that sort of limit their turndown. They get really concerned about how far you can turn down a boiler. And so that’s going to affect its cost effectiveness in the end.

How efficient is it on turndown? And when boilers have to turn down—and they do—then we’re going to potentially have some risks. So there’s a lot of uncertainty about the turndown capabilities. And then the other major concern boxed in red here is the emissions, so combustion of pure hydrogen with air starts to become an issue with respect to thermal NOx formation. And so these folks are beginning to do the research to understand what actually happens in that environment and whether or not emissions are going to be a major concern. Other concerns that they pointed out is the gas nozzles themselves, materials for the nozzles, for the valve train, for the refractory may have to change. So these are all pieces of research that need to happen: certifications and testing of the processes, testing of the products, so what happens in products and so forth. And so there are a number of other areas of concern that they would point out. So what we did was we looked at these boilers, and we said, “OK.” We looked at three different scenarios. And what we did … I mentioned we took … So our U.S. region model is a top-down analysis looking at an economywide demand for all sorts of end-use fuels. I mean, everything you can imagine. And they evaluate the trajectory of cost performance, the learning curves on the equipment, and ultimately, on various decades of time or time frames, year by year, understanding what those cost trajectories are. And the various sectors of the economies that are going to demand that. Their willingness to pay. All these things go into this model, ultimately, drops out a demand for everything from methanol to ammonia to hydrogen to existing fossil fuels.

And we end up in each of these dates, we can peg what we think the market clearing price of each of those commodities is going to be. We feed that into a bottom-up model, basically say, “If this is what the market clearing price for methanol is going to be, or for hydrogen is going to be, then this is what the cost, based on what we understand of the cost of conversion of the equipment and the cost of the fuel and an operating and capital costs, or for new equipment. What is likely to be the conversion to the commodity? What’s going to be adopted?”

And so we run these scenarios. The first scenario on the left is the reference case and is business as usual. It assumes energy efficiency is taking place at the current rate. And basically, the thing that’s causing the growth there is just growth in industrial demand. We’re going to continue to grow population. We’re going to continue to grow industrial demand for products. The second table—we ran three different scenarios. This is an energy chart, by the way. This is not emissions. So this is looking at energy.

And it says, “Look. If whether we’re doing maximum achievable energy efficiency alone, the third scenario is the progressing towards 70% hydrogen natural gas blend.” And then the last scenario is maximum achievable energy efficiency plus 100% hydrogen demand. It’s the same amount of energy because it’s the same industrial demand. So it doesn’t change. And what we see in that forecast is the total final energy sort of relatively flat across that time frame because we’re sort of assuming the same energy.

We end up sort of overcoming with an energy efficiency work, the maximum achievable energy efficiency. We’re sort of overcoming some of that demand issues. And then energy consumption forecast with a widespread electrification, we see that sort of down turning.

Two minutes? OK. All right.

So what we find here is that these will convert. And then we model what the emissions effects of that would be. And so we can see that with natural gas transition to 100% hydrogen, we have some impacts, some benefits. But it’s not that much greater than a transition to 70%. We see that electrification and the combination of electrification and hydrogen, we think we can get significant emissions reductions. We had a similar approach to industrial. The thing I want to point out here is that the industrial processes furnaces, we had a good bunch of different potential companies that we looked at. But on the U.S. side, very few companies—only about 11%—really looking at conversion. And international business is a little bit more.

And I want to take you to this chart here. Let me back up one. So this is looking at industrial decarbonization and the same scenarios that we talked about before. And so you can see that if we … The three lines on the right are the emissions impact of industrial decarbonization through hydrogen adoption. And the bottom line, the lowest line, is with the application of 100% hydrogen. And so the interesting thing here is that we do see tremendous reduction potential, something like 300 to 400 million metric tons per year of reduction.

And if we do electrification at the same time, there’s another 150 or so reduction potential there. So the combination of those two strategies are very important for us to consider. And so the last message I want to leave you with … And I’ve got more slides that we could go through in the future in some of the other sessions. But what we find is that we really need to focus on optionality. We need to make sure we keep all of these options open.

We find that, in general, there is opportunity to potentially deploy hydrogen in high-temperature applications where the hydrogen may have other value, such as reduction properties for different metals and concrete, that sort of thing, where hydrogen has additional value directly. And those would be the early adopters. But later on, we really have to come up with strategies on blending, and then decarbonization through both carbon capture. So we’re also taking a close look at carbon capture in the industrial setting is.

It’s an economic challenge to do that in these ubiquitous number of units of production that we have in the industrial setting. So that’s what I have. I’m going to stop there. For now, we can talk about the economywide stuff at some other time. All right, thanks.

JOE CRESKO: Thanks, Perry. I mean, it’s particularly important. You think about boilers, they’re so ubiquitous. But being able to get this kind of input from a range of stakeholders doing this detailed work is really … We really appreciate the depth of this work. And these slides will be available. There’s a lot of content here that I think people are going to want to dive into later. And I know it’s very difficult with the length of this room to see on the screen, but it is a wealth of information. Thank you very much, Perry.

Next, I want to introduce Dr. Lauren Ross. Lauren is the deputy director for energy justice in DOE’s Office of Energy, Justice, and Equity. In this role, Lauren leads EJE’s research and policy efforts to support a more just energy economy. Previously, she was part of DOE’s State and Community Energy Program (SCEP) at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and was at ACEEE (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy). Dr. Ross holds a B.A. in public policy from the University of Delaware, an M.A. in sociology from GWU, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Temple University. So I’d like to bring up Lauren right now. Thank you.

LAUREN ROSS: OK. I might be short enough to make this actually work. Can you hear me OK? Great. So, hi, everyone. And thank you, Joe, for that. I don’t know if I touched something. Thank you for that introduction. As Joe mentioned, I’m Lauren Ross. I’m deputy director of energy justice within DOE’s Office of Energy, Justice, and Equity. This is week three on the job, but I’ve been with DOE for the past year.

And so just a quick overview of our office for those of you who may be unfamiliar … We were formerly known as the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity and founded in 1978. So we’re almost as old as the department. Our mission is to help ensure that everyone is afforded an opportunity to participate fully in the Department of Energy’s programs, opportunities, and resources. We have led the implementation of the Justice40 Initiative across DOE, and have identified over 140 covered programs.

Among many activities, we advise the secretary on the effects of energy policies, regulations, and other actions on the department, and its components on minorities and minority business enterprises, disadvantaged communities. And on ways to ensure that these groups are afforded an opportunity to participate fully in the energy programs of the department. We also conduct research and policy analysis to determine the socioeconomic impacts of DOE’s programs and policies.

The office has engaged in recent years quite closely with IEDO, and we certainly look forward to continuing that engagement. And so my talk today will be also somewhat of a level-set conversation. I plan to discuss some of the key ways in which energy justice is being pursued across the department and some of the direct implications and opportunities for industrial decarbonization. But before we jump into the conversation and about energy justice, why it’s important, and its context in the energy space, I thought it’d be helpful to establish what I mean by the term energy justice.

What exactly is energy justice? And why does it matter? Simply stated, energy justice means ensuring equitable access and participation in the energy system while minimizing or eliminating any harm. Energy justice means deploying our energy in ways that are more affordable, clean, and benefits everyone. So I’m sure that—or at least I hope so, that this concept seems agreeable to many of you. But why now? Why is the emphasis on accessible, clean, and democratically managed energy happening now? Why have several states, the federal government, and countries across the world taken up this concept and made it a priority across recent legislation? In its simplest form, how our energy infrastructure was built and is fueled has had major consequences for certain communities across our country. And it’s imperative that we begin to make the progress on this front—not tomorrow, not in the next legislative session, but now. To explain some of this urgency, I’ll walk through some recent developments and then follow up what I consider to be the light at the end of the tunnel, some concrete ways to help us tackle some of these deep, deep disparities.

So first—and as I’m sure everyone is quite aware, in this room—in 2021, the federal government kick started this transition with a once in a generation investment in our nation with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that will invest over $1 trillion in our nation’s infrastructure over the next 10 years for the national electric grid, industrial decarbonization, clean energy, environmental remediation, and electric vehicle charging, among many other investments. The legislation also means that for the next 5 years, DOE programs will be standing up over 60 new programs, including 16 demonstration and