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Abstract

The highly energy-intensive industries are the key for in global climate change mitigation. Despite discussions of decarbonization potentials at national and global levels, plant-specific mitigation potentials and technologically driven pathways remain unclear, which cumulatively determines the progress of net-zero transition of the global highly energy-intensive industries. Here we develop a CO2 emissions inventories for nearly 500,000 individual plants across steel and iron sector, aluminum smelters, oil refinery plants etc along with their technical characteristics, including processing routes and operating details (status, age, operation-years etc.). We identify and match appropriate emission-removal or zero-emission technologies to specific possessing routes, or what we define thereafter as a techno-specific decarbonization road map for every plant. Low-carbon retrofitting following the operational characteristics of plants is key for limiting warming to 2 °C, whereas advanced retrofitting may help limit warming to 1.5 °C. Our results provide a detailed picture of CO2 emission patterns associated with production processing of global energy infrastructure, illustrating the decarbonization pathway to the net-zero-emissions target with the efforts from each plant.

Professor Dabo Guan is a joint Distinguished Chair of Climate Change and Low Carbon Transition at Tsinghua University China and University College London, UK, the Deputy Director of Tsinghua Institute for Carbon Neutrality. He specialises in developing emission inventories and global supply chain models to advance understanding of the mutual feedbacks between human activities and climate change. He serves as the Chief Scientist in coordinating China-EU Flagship Cooperation Programme on Climate Change and Biodiversity. He was a Lead Author for the IPCC AR5. He was the Highly Cited Researcher for 2018–2024, top thousand climate academics. He has authored over 300+ publications, including 9 articles published in Nature, and 60+ in Nature Research Journals, and PNAS. He received the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize 2014, the Leontief Prize 3 times and the Philip Leverhulme Prize. He publishes impactful research, and received Altimetric Top 100 award for 3 times between 2018–2020.