Beyond the factory: Ten interdisciplinary lessons for industrial decarbonisation practice and policy

Industry is a crucial but extremely challenging sector to decarbonise. Global industrial emissions in 2020 accounted for 38% of total final energy use emissions, when feedstocks, furnaces, and ovens are included. The Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC) has integrated expertise and insights from various disciplines and sectors in real-world contexts to enable the United Kingdom to meet its industrial net-zero targets. This paper draws methodologically from a research synthesis of IDRIC funded projects and outputs to provide a list of ten crosscutting findings relevant for net-zero policy and practice. These cover thematic aspects as diverse as energy efficiency, heat integration, hydrogen, diverse energy carriers production and utilisation, CCUS, negative emissions technologies, systems integration, emissions accounting and energy policy and regulation. The complexity of industrial decarbonisation demands an integrated approach that draws from diverse fields, including science, engineering, policy, and economics. Singular solutions/disciplinary boundaries or isolated efforts are often insufficient to address the multifaceted challenges industries face in reducing their emissions to zero by 2050.