This article is a contribution to the NNWI Conference 2026: Powering Industrial Decarbonisation.
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Co-author: Shiva Sundaram, Commercial Director, Materials Processing Institute
The consensus pathways for decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries, particularly for materials processing, follow a familiar logic of reduction in demand, material efficiencies, process efficiencies, short term incremental changes in fuel and feedstock, medium term step changes in fuel, feedstock (and primary energy source) and circular economy synergies, and adoption of radically lower emission technologies.
Steel is a prime example. Given that today’s industrial economies have a high dependency on steel, and that globally one in every twelve tonnes of net CO2 emitted to the atmosphere can be directly attributed to steel production, there is an extreme need to decarbonise the industry. Low emission sources of both high intensity electrical power and high temperature heat can go a significant way to decarbonising the overall operation of steelmaking, and the same applies to the production of primary iron which is needed to produce steel in the volumes and qualities demanded by the market, even when steel recycling is maximised.
As iron production and steel making, traditionally an integrated activity, gradually decouple globally the distribution of power demand shifts and some of the old carbon-powered synergies are lost, shifting the focus to electrification. And yet the power demand for a typical steelworks can equal that of a small city. This creates opportunity for embedded energy supply to supplement and complement the transition to majority renewable grids, and the same can be said for other metals, glass, chemicals and cement production.
A further synergy with the ‘foundation industries’ of steel and cement is of course the development of a resilient low embedded carbon materials supply chain for the build out of modular, embedded power generation. The Materials Processing Institute is at the forefront of developing commercial production processes for high recycled content steel grades suitable for high specification engineering steels which can be made with clean electricity through Electric Arc Furnaces. Our work now includes world firsts in scaling up production of new grades of steel suitable for nuclear fusion energy devices where a critical criterion for working life of the material and for future generations is that those materials themselves are ‘low activation’ i.e. will not be adversely altered by neutron radiation, and will be themselves recyclable within very short timescales.
Finally, the continual gains in advanced materials formulations and production processes are accelerating all the time through integration of human-centred AI. This is borne out in quicker materials development using well-trained and intuitive machine insights into the links between raw materials inputs, processing and performance, and in increasing efficiency and consistency of production by well-integrated process control and monitoring. And the power demand for ‘AI’ is itself now proving to be a leading pull factor for dedicated, embedded modular power systems. Synergies are all around, and our own industrial ingenuity and investment vision can still harmonise them to slow and even reverse the trends in emissions and climate breakdown which we all recognise.
