AIDRES: A database for the decarbonisation of the heavy industry in Europe

The AIDRES database aims to support the long-term objective of a fully integrated industrial strategy in the EU 27, providing a service to the European Commission and a catalogue for industries to understand the effectiveness, efficiency and cost of potential innovation pathways for achieving carbon neutral processes in the steel, chemical, cement, glass, fertilizers and refineries sectors by 2050. The approach considers the geographical distribution of the annual production of key products quantified at EU-nuts3 regional level. Process integration techniques are used to generate and evaluate the reference and future optimal production routes, providing a quantitative, technical and multi-criteria estimate of energy demand in Europe’s major industrial sectors. Decarbonisation of the production considers routes achieving either (i) the substitution of less energy intensive products, (ii) the electrification of the production, (iii) the use of oxy-combustion, (iv) carbon capture transport and storage, (v) the use of alternative fuels and (vi) biomass. This results in a per-ton-of-product database containing the energy supply, the direct emissions at the plant, the amount of captured CO2 and the associated capital expenditure of each route. Scenarios 2018-2050 for the energy prices, indirect upstream emissions, CO2 allowance and production shift are considered to foreseen the operation expenditure and total emissions. Finally, the per-ton database is scaled-up at the nuts3 level by the regional production capacity. The application of the database is demonstrated at the EU level for the analysis of the present and future evolution of the heavy industrial sectors, including heat recovery and symbiosis with further sectors.