Decarbonizing Transport & Industry

Roughly 25% of global energy use is not electricity — it is heat, fuel, and chemistry that electric grids do not directly serve. Steel, cement, aviation, shipping, and heavy industry together produce a substantial share of global emissions and resist the cheap-clean-electricity solution that decarbonizes the grid. These are the hard-to-abate sectors — somewhere between a quarter and a third of all emissions, and the part of the problem with no cheap drop-in fix. The grid can be greened by building more wind and solar; these cannot, because the carbon is bound up in the heat they need, the molecules they make, or the energy density their fuel must carry. Replacing one fossil-fuel use with one clean alternative is now well-understood across them; doing it at industrial scale, at acceptable cost, on a deadline, is the harder problem — and the one that will decide whether the late-stage emissions curve actually bends.

Electric vehicles are the most-advanced sector. By 2024, ~20% of global new car sales were EVs (up from ~3% in 2020); China leads at ~30% of new sales, Europe at ~20%, the US at ~10%. Battery prices below $100/kWh — the threshold at which EVs reach price parity with ICE vehicles without subsidy — are now expected by 2026. Charging infrastructure, grid capacity, and battery supply chains are the deployment constraints; the technology is essentially done. Heavy transport (long-haul trucking, shipping, aviation) is harder, and the reason is physical: a battery storing the energy of a tank of jet fuel would be far too heavy to fly. So light vehicles go electric, but the long-range modes need synthetic fuels, hydrogen, or ammonia instead: trucks lean on fuel cells or sustainable fuels for long routes, ships on ammonia or methanol, and aviation on sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), with full electrification limited to short-haul. Industrial heat (steel, cement, glass, chemicals) requires temperatures of 1,000–1,500°C that electric heating can deliver in principle but at much higher cost than gas. Green hydrogen (electrolytic, from renewable electricity) is the most-discussed long-term solution; ~95 Mt/yr of hydrogen is produced globally as of 2024, but only ~1% is currently green. Carbon capture on existing industrial processes is the alternative path. The guiding logic is simple to state and hard to execute: electrify what you can, and use hydrogen or capture for what you cannot. Cement is the sharpest case (~8% of global emissions; much of its CO₂ comes from the calcination of limestone itself, not the fuel, so capture is unavoidable), with steel close behind (the direct reduced iron route swaps hydrogen for coking coal — technically proven but expensive). Chemicals — plastics, ammonia for fertilizer — are harder still, since here fossil hydrocarbons are the feedstock, not merely the energy source.