Evaluating Energy Transitions to Achieve Net-Zero Goals

The chemical industry’s move to set aggressive Net Zero targets at the enterprise level has many sites scrambling to figure out how best to meet them. The easy, lower cost things like LED lighting, waste heat recovery, operational changes and Advanced Control come first, but at some point to get to Net-Zero, you need to start transitioning equipment to clean energy. For the chemical industry, that means (green) electrification of major combustion equipment, like compressors, furnaces and boilers, and moving away from fossil fuel generated energy systems. A common methodology that companies are using to evaluate and rank different “greening” options is called the Marginal Abatement Cost, or MAC Curves. This paper will present the MACC concepts and illustrate its use in several industrial examples.