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, long-haul trucking, plastics, fertilizers, and heavy industrial heat together produce a substantial share of global emissions and resist the cheap-clean-electricity solution that decarbonizes the grid. Replacing one fossil-fuel use with one clean alternative is now well-understood across these sectors; doing it at industrial scale, at acceptable cost, on a deadline, is the harder problem.
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. Trucks: battery-electric for short routes, hydrogen fuel cells or sustainable fuels for long. Ships: ammonia, methanol, or LNG transitions. Aviation: sustainable aviation fuels (SAF, often biofuels or synthetic) at modest scale; full electrification is restricted 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; ~10 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. Cement (~8% of global emissions; CO₂ from limestone calcination is unavoidable in the standard process) and steel (the direct reduced iron with hydrogen route is technically proven but expensive) are the hardest single sectors.
Hydrogen is nascent: industrial-scale electrolyzers are being deployed but cost-competitiveness depends on cheap renewable electricity and high carbon prices that don't yet exist in most markets. Steel — HYBRIT in Sweden, H2 Green Steel in Sweden, ArcelorMittal trials elsewhere — is in early commercial pilot. Cement — Heidelberg, Holcim, Sublime Systems — is exploring multiple chemistries. Sustainable aviation fuel production is at <1% of jet fuel demand. The Inflation Reduction Act (US 2022) and the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (2023) are the largest policy interventions specifically targeting hard-to-abate sectors. The honest assessment is that transport is on track and industry is not; the post-2030 emissions story depends substantially on how fast industrial pathways scale.