First electric cars. Next, electric factories? They could be a major new way to slow global warming.
BASF is in the business of molecules. As the world’s biggest chemicals firm, with operations in more than 90 countries, it makes a lot of them. When those molecules contain carbon atoms (and a great many do—they are a wonderfully versatile resource) those carbon atoms tend to come from fossil fuels. When their manufacture requires high temperatures, which is also often the case, that heat comes from burning fossil fuels. Until recently basf’s massive plant in Ludwigshafen in Germany accounted for 4% of the country’s entire consumption of natural gas.
Conventional wisdom has it that such a firm cannot really hope to lower very much the number of carbon-dioxide molecules it creates in the course of its business. The path to decarbonisation will come instead from gathering up those molecules and disposing of them underground, a process known as carbon capture and storage (ccs). The same conventional wisdom holds that if basf were to swear off burning molecules of gas to create heat, the obvious green alternative would be to burn hydrogen molecules instead. Those molecules would have to be manufactured, too, in an energy-intensive process.