Industrial decarbonization

Industrial decarbonization will not be easy. Hard-to-abate sectors like heavy-duty transport (maritime shipping and long-haul trucking), the airline industry, and the chemical industry face significant challenges in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonizing the petrochemical industry which produces inexpensive everyday products that make our lives safer and easier is a monumental challenge. The question is, how do we reduce emissions while maintaining our standard of life?

What about Industrial electrification?

While electrification is a great solution for light duty mobility applications, power generation, and short duration energy storage, it has limits when applied to chemical manufacturing and other emissions heavy industries like heavy-duty transport, steel manufacturing, and cement manufacturing. Industrial electrification by providing heat through electricity may be the ideal solution from a climate perspective—using electricity from exclusively renewable sources—but it is simply not practical. It is easier and cheaper to burn fossil fuels than to completely redesign petrochemical complexes to run on electric heating. To advance industrial electrification, a novel solution to introducing electricity into the equation without rendering billions of dollars of petrochemical plants obsolete is necessary.

What about hydrogen?

Prevailing thought is that we will need a combination of electrification and decarbonization via increased hydrogen adoption to reach net zero. Hydrogen can be converted to electricity directly in fuel cells or it can be converted to ammonia, which has great potential as a stable energy carrier and clean fuel. Hydrogen is one of the most widely used gases in the world and will play a major role in our fight to protect the climate. The focus now turns to how we generate clean hydrogen at a cost industry can afford. While the green hydrogen vs. blue hydrogen discussion is ongoing, the prohibitive cost of green hydrogen is currently a problem.

Broadening the deep-decarbonization conversation

The elephant in the room regarding decarbonization is combustion. Most chemical reactions used to refine fuel, harvest hydrogen, manufacture plastics, and produce thousands of products we use every day like steel and fuel require heat. Traditional chemical reactors use thermal energy and pressure to energize reactions. That heat comes from burning fossil fuels. Any deep decarbonization solution in chemical manufacturing must not only replace combustion in this process, but it must also make use of existing refinery and petrochemical assets to sustain the flow of common products and keep costs low.

decarbonizing by electrifying the chemical industry

Syzygy is developing technologies that liberate the chemical industry and its myriad chemical reactions from combustion. Our scalable, reliable Rigel photoreactor uses the principles of plasmonic photocatalysis to combine LED light from renewable electricity and photocatalytic nanoparticles to power chemical reactions with light instead of heat. Without going into too much detail about our photoreactor technology, plasmonic photocatalysis has advanced to the point that we are confident that it will enable us to cost effectively advance industrial decarbonization by electrifying the chemical industry. While we relied on heat in the past, today we are achieving the same results by simply applying light.