Biden administration rolls out effort to curb industrial greenhouse gas emissions
President Biden is launching a multi-pronged program to reduce industrial sector greenhouse gas emissions.
The centerpiece of the plan, which will cover activities like manufacturing and cement production, is $8 billion in spending on Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs, a Department of Energy initiative funded by the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. (Clean Hydrogen, also known as Green Hydrogen, is created using low-carbon energy sources and can be used as a replacement for natural gas in uses such as heating.)
The administration is also creating a Buy Clean Task Force that will prioritize buying products with lower carbon footprints for federal agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation. On Tuesday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality will also issue guidance on how to ensure that carbon capture and storage — a process in which emissions from factories or power plants would be captured at the smokestack and stored underground — can be done in an environmentally responsible manner.
“With these announcements, we won’t just be creating more manufacturing jobs, we’ll be advancing clean manufacturing, so that we can lead the world with an industrial sector that is rapidly reducing greenhouse emissions [and] rapidly reducing local air pollution,” a senior administration official told reporters during a Monday press briefing.
While previous federal policies to combat climate change have focused on reducing emissions from the energy and transportation sectors, this will be the first major initiative targeting industrial emissions.
“The industrial sector is the hardest to decarbonize,” another official said during the Zoom briefing. “Without decarbonizing, the industrial sector is on track to become the highest-emitting sector within the U.S. economy in this decade.”
Transportation is the leading contributor to U.S. emissions, with the bulk of those coming as the result of gasoline burned in car and truck engines, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In all, transportation accounts for 29 percent of the country’s emissions. Electricity generation is the second-highest contributor of emissions, accounting for 25 percent of the total because most electricity is produced by burning coal or natural gas. Industry is almost as big a contributor to climate change, accounting for 23 percent of American emissions. (That share would be closer to 30 percent if the emissions from generating the electricity used in industrial processes were included.)
Whereas the path to reducing emissions in energy and transportation is relatively straightforward — have electric utilities to rely on clean sources of energy such as wind and solar, and have vehicles run on that clean electricity — the means of reducing industrial emissions is less well-established.
Factories often use fossil fuels to produce certain chemical reactions at high temperatures. For example, burning coal to make steel accounts for roughly 5 percent of global carbon emissions. Cement emits carbon dioxide both from the energy used to fire raw materials such as limestone and clay, and the chemical reaction they produce. The cement production process causes 8 percent of global emissions.
Since much of Biden’s agenda to address climate change would require construction of products such as wind turbines that utilize steel or cement, it is important to reduce those emissions as much as possible.
“As you look at things like steel and cement and aluminum, the real opportunity to decarbonize comes from harnessing technologies that weren't available in the past,” said the second administration official, referring to green hydrogen and carbon capture-and-storage, as well as the potential to use new, low-carbon materials in some products.
While the key components of Biden’s climate plan remain stuck in the Senate, where Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has refused to vote for the president’s Build Back Better agenda, the administration is doing what it can through executive actions such as those announced on Tuesday.
And this isn’t the Biden administration’s first attempt to cut industrial emissions. In late October, the U.S. and European Union announced a joint plan to negotiate the world’s first emissions-based trade agreement on steel and aluminum — essentially an agreement to restrict access to their markets for dirtier steel made in other countries.
