Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee Fourth Meeting – Day 1 Text Version

ZACH PRITCHARD: All right, everybody. Let's go ahead and get started. Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for being here this morning [inaudible] or when we get to recording this. This Zoom call, including all audio and images of participants and presentation materials may be imported, saved, edited, distributed, used internally, posted on DOE's website, or otherwise made publicly available. 

If you continue to access this file and provide such audio or image content, you consent to such use by or on behalf of DOE and the government for government purposes and acknowledge that you will not inspect or approve, or be compensated for, such use. Thanks, everyone. Good morning. Welcome to all the members and to anyone joining us today for today's leading Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee. 

I'm Zach Pritchard. I'm the technology manager at DOE's Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office, and I'm the designated federal officer for [inaudible] committee. I'm joined today also by Celina Harris here at the front, who is also a technology manager at IEDO and who is the alternate designated federal officer for the committee. 

Before we dive into the meeting today, I'm going to cover a few housekeeping and administrative items. Today's open meeting of the Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee is being called the [inaudible] of the Federal Advisory Committee Act in other applicable statutes and regulations. For today's meeting, the [inaudible] chat has been disabled, and the audience is not able to unmute and turn on their cameras. 

Members, if you do join the Zoom, first of all, please do not join the audio to avoid any audio feedback issues because there are microphones here in the room. Also, please do not use the presenters' chat for anything other than technical issues. All substantive topics discussed orally for the benefit of the [inaudible]. 

The procedure to offer or comment for this meeting was described in the Federal Register notice. Thank you to those who registered to provide comment. Public comment period is [inaudible] to refer to the end of the second day of our meeting. That will be around 12:50 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. For others, the committee does want to hear from you, and we welcome your comments. 

Written statements may be submitted to ITIAC@ee.doe.gov, and you can register to provide oral comments at [inaudible] meetings when they're announced. I also want to note the DOE is continually seeking new member nominations to consider for future vacancies on the committee and to maintain balance and points of view. 

Nominations can be submitted to that same email address: ITIAC@ee.doe.gov. And you should include the nominee's name, their resume, their biography, and any letters of support. And finally, since we don't have everybody on Zoom and [inaudible] list, let's do a roll call so that we have that for the record. 

So, in the room today, we [inaudible]. We have Sharon Nolen. 

SHARON NOLEN: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Sunday Abraham. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Cathy Choi. 

CATHY CHOI: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Subodh Das. 

SUBODH DAS: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Betsy Dutrow. 

ELIZABETH DUTROW: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Neal Elliott. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Comas Haynes. 

COMAS HAYNES: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Abigail Regitsky. Jeffrey Rissman. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Sasha Stashwick. Sridhar Seetharaman. 

SRIDHAR SEETHARAMAN: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Jolene Sheil. Virtually, we have Joe Powell joining us. 

JOE POWELL: Present. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thanks, Joe. Is Sergio online? He may not have joined us yet. Sergio Espinosa is not here, but hopefully, he's joining us later. And then for Arun Majumdar, we have David Brauer. 

Today, we do not have Akshay Sahni, Anna Fendley, or Sue Clark. With that, I will turn things over to the chair of the Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee, Sharon Nolen. 

SHARON NOLEN: I just want to welcome everybody to our [inaudible]—our first meeting that we had in March—and strangers to each other. It's nice to come in the room and hear everybody chatting and talking about [inaudible]. That's—really nice thing. 

I especially want to welcome Sunday. It's his first [inaudible] chance to talk to you today. And I just want to make a few comments about the news. So, everybody heard about the great benefits in North Carolina. It's very close to go live.  And, so, [inaudible] personally evicted and work ...  And, so, I think seeing something like that happen [inaudible] … We hear about 500-year floods and thousand-year floods. We're just seeing those more and more, and we start questioning those numbers as to the reasons. 

I think we also have seen many examples of resilience and determination [inaudible]. I know personally and the stories that [inaudible] are amazing.  And, so, I just want to encourage all of us to think about [inaudible] has been faced with [inaudible]. I think it's an opportunity to make a difference.  And, so, we certainly want to. 

So, thank you, everyone, for traveling to be here with us today. And [inaudible] day's discussions so we can move forward [inaudible]. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thanks, Sharon. And I also, before we dive into presentations, wanted to give an opportunity for IEDO's—I don't think I can say [inaudible] but recently, deputy director [inaudible]. 

PAUL GAUCHE: [inaudible] things. OK. Morning, everybody, and I have walked around introducing myself individually. Great to be here. If you didn't get a business card—first name, last name at ee.doe.gov. So, feel free to reach out. 

Yeah, I've been here for a little over 6 months—loving it. It strikes me that every day that we've got such an important mission in IEDO. And I'm amazed by how often we find ourselves in the White House on some matter, whether it's on data centers or steel industry or the cement and concrete industry and so forth. The mission is so incredibly vital. 
And while close to a quarter of $1 billion a year might seem like a lot—and I think you all that are from industry know that it's actually quite a small amount. And we've got 25 years to do this thing to get to net zero—meaning free. Industrial decarbonization is hard—and greatly appreciate your participation here. 

My background—I'm a mechanical engineer. Don't hold that against me. And I have a more recent type of semiconductor industry experience. And about a little over 15 years ago, I switched over to renewables, specifically concentrating solar power, a lovely technology, very complicated for serving in industrial decarbonization, too. And with that, a sort of—I guess a graduation of—thermal energy storage background as well. So, I'd love to chat with you all about stuff like that [inaudible]. [Audio out] OK. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: One other note for our members—you should have gotten [inaudible] a few minutes ago. We will be using [inaudible] again to help facilitate a collection of Q&A and some collaborative notetaking. Definitely encourage people to add their questions verbally, but if we don't have time to get to everything, you could drop those comments.

You're all [inaudible] online. 

With that, I think we should go into our first presentation from our [inaudible] Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. [inaudible] Introduce yourselves. Thanks so much for joining us. I'll say also, thanks to all the committee members who suggested presentation ideas and ranked different options across their [inaudible] presentations tomorrow. We're hoping to get [inaudible] some issues that you all raised. So [inaudible] that presentation has a couple parts to it [inaudible]. 

MELIA MANTER: Good morning, everyone. Really nice to be here. My name is Melia Manter, and I am in the engagement office of OCED. I'm a stakeholder engagement specialist focused on the Industrial Demonstrations Program. 

ABBEY BLUM: And I'm Abbey Blum [inaudible]. 

JAMES HAUG: I'm James Haug. I'm the associate director over the hydrogen hubs, which is currently in the OCED portfolio. 

MELIA MANTER: And I know this group probably doesn't need to hear much about the importance of industrial demonstration programs. I think we've all established—very important. But I just want to walk folks through a little bit of the timeline that we've been working with. 

So, in March of 2023, we issued our $6 million funding announcement. This most recent March, in 2024, we selected 33 projects across more than 20 states for negotiations. And then in August, we started to make the awards. And then, as of today, 10 out of our 32 projects have been awarded. 

And I will just note, we initially selected 33 projects. One has dropped out. And we are now working on 32. Go to the next slide. 

And then the larger timeline specifically for community benefits commitments—as part of the initial application, the applicant submitted a community benefits plan. And then, after selections, the selectees have entered this negotiation phase, where we're figuring out what is going to be ultimately implemented into their community benefits that are required for the award. 

So, 22 of the projects are still in this negotiation phase for the community benefits. And 10—at the projects—we've agreed upon the community benefits [inaudible] that are moving forward into the next phases. Community benefits will continue to be implemented throughout Phases 2, 3, and 4. And they are part of the go and no-go decisions. And we'll talk a little bit about the 10 projects that have already been awarded and what the community benefits look like. Next slide, please. 

ABBEY BLUM: All right. So, I'll walk you through. You can see on the screen here—we have the 10 projects that have been awarded. We'll get into more detail in the next slide as well. I'm happy to [inaudible] about any [inaudible]. And I will just note up front for all of the projects that's been awarded on our website, there is only a project fact sheet and a community benefits summary that are published with [inaudible]. So, for all of these, they have both the materials. 

And then, as we finish negotiations and we announce awards for the rest of the project during Phase 1, that material will be awarded, as well. So here the [inaudible] award is for all lead, BASF, all the Cleveland Cliffs projects, Constellium, Chemical Company, Heidelberg Materials, Kohler Company, Libbey Glass, Roanoke Cement, and U.S. Pipe and Foundry. So, a pretty good geographic mix already. And then on the next slide, we'll get a little bit more about this. 

OK. So, I know it's small font. Apologies in advance. And if there are any questions, I'm happy to walk through those. But on the left here, you'll see the awardee. The center column here is what's the announced selection for their community benefit, so back in March. And then on the right, here is what their community benefits commitment is now at Phase 1 that we have into the first wave of the board. So, what I'll really highlight here—and again, we're trying to answer questions. The big portion is we've noticed a real trend amongst all the—thank you. 

We've noticed a real trend amongst all the awardees that the premise are by and large upheld, if not enhanced, as we move into Phase 1. So, we found that the material we received in applications were very strong. Obviously, [inaudible] this was the first report of its—so that we found the requirements and found what we were looking for. And then as we've gone through negotiations and investigated Phase 1, there's a lot more the company are willing to do and are willing to stay publicly within, which is great. 

So, I'll just highlight one here. I think, for example, Heidelberg, you can see in the middle here. So, at the time of announcement, they really focused on jobs in their materials. And then as we're moving into Phase 1, they retained those same jobs numbers, and then they are also doing enhanced kind of air quality reporting, and they're working with a preliminary. So, I think those are all of our slides. I'm going to talk a little bit more. 

But yeah, so again, I think the challenges that we've been facing have just been time, that this has [inaudible] outside, and they knew me.  And, so, they were really trying to get this right because of the added benefit of this manner for both me and for companies and [inaudible]. And besides that, though, I do think that we're seeing this—it's a new effort, right? That's part of what's also difficult. It's never easy to take the private sector, by and large, and that's a struggle in and of itself. 

But we're seeing that people are really willing to communicate and meet up to where they can and do what they can to uphold the commitment to data collection and acknowledgment. So, that's all from us. There's a slide after this with just our collective projects. Stay tuned. These will be coming soon. And again, I don't know if you want to Q and A now or go to [inaudible]. Yeah. 

JAMES HAUG: OK. Yeah. What's wrong? [inaudible] 

SPEAKER: I'm happy to talk to you— 

JAMES HAUG: Either way. [inaudible] 

RAMSEY FAHS: Well, while we're getting the slides up, great to meet everyone. I'm Ramsey Fahs. I'm a policy advisor at OCED. So, these folks up here—I'm focused on the Hydrogen Hub's demand-side support program. So, Hydrogen Hubs bought our $8 billion program, $7 billion of which is going to CapEx investments in seven regional hubs for exchange leading. And then the remaining funds, starting in about $500 million, is going towards a demand pulled pilot program that is attempting to solve a chicken-and-egg problem in packaging and the cost of a lot of other sectors of supply waiting for bankable demand for them to make their decisions—to make an investment and build and demand waiting for supply to come online. 

So, I think a lot has been made of this chicken-and-egg movement across hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, green [inaudible] in this field—basically any of these sectors where there's not really a tradition of long-term fixed price dropping, which is often what's needed to get these early projects—first place. And, so, the hydrogen hub's demand-side program is our attempt to say, “OK, for hydrogen, can we take a little bit of money and structure something that will be in demand for initiative,” which means it will be paid for performance. 

Winning projects will get some kind of incentive for the suppliers to program for clean hydrogen actually producing new …  And, so, that way, they can take that agreement to their investors and say, “Hey, I know if we produce a kilogram of clean hydrogen, we'll get some fixed amount of benefit for it, and you can take that into the underwriting phase here.” So, I can get a little more into it in Q&A. We worked with a few ideas around exactly how that full incentive works. I'm also trying to set it up in such a way that we can do other demand-side activities in other sectors if that becomes of interest, especially as a lot of these other sectors face similar challenges [inaudible]. 

Supply or oversupply in [inaudible]. But will pass it over to James to give an overview of the manufacturing. 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah. So as Ramsay mentioned, there's been $8 billion that's been allocated for the hydrogen hub, $7 billion for the capital to build the infrastructure, and the rest—remaining funds going to the demand-side program that Ramsay is talking about. So, back in last October, seven hubs were selected out of many, many applications that were received. 

And it's taken us a while to get to this point. We actually have three of the hubs are under award as of August of this year. And that's the ARCHES hub, which is in California all up and down the state; Pacific Northwest, which is primarily Washington, Oregon; and one project in Montana, and then the Appalachian hub, which is also known as ARCH 2, which is West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. 

So, those three are under award, which basically means they begin Phase 1, which is very early planning. The other hubs are still in negotiations, so we hope to get a few more across the line here, hopefully, before the end of the year. But, like I said, that's up to negotiations right now. So, with the seven hubs, there are over 100 individual projects. And the idea behind the hub structure is to, basically, as Ramsay was saying—you can't just go out and procure a bunch of facilities that produce hydrogen if you don't have the actual infrastructure to use it. Right? 

So, the idea of the hub concept is—within regions of the U.S.—you're basically investing those dollars to bring both the supply and the demand infrastructure, as well as the connecting infrastructure in between them, up at the same time. So, within those 100 or so projects, there's a great variety of different types of projects, including their sizes. Right? We have things that are massive—sort of hydrogen production facilities on the order of 1,000 tons per day of clean hydrogen—all the way to procuring fuel cell buses for local municipalities in that region or heavy haul trucking, which I'll get into in a second in terms of what the remit is. 

So, it is a fairly vast program to oversee all of that. We are in a gated development process, as I mentioned. So, the hubs that have entered into a ward have entered Phase 1, which I know you can't see from the back of the room. But that's basically—if you're used to major capital projects and infrastructure, you'll hear a term called pre-feed, which is front-end engineering and design. Everything in the portfolio is pre-feed. In fact, most of it is in very conceptual design phase right now as we enter into Phase 1. 

And there's a lot of work there that needs to be done in that pre-feed space, including all sorts of things around what project site are you going to try to notionally put, what are you going to put into—there's a lot of planning for the NEPA process and things like that are occurring in Phase 1. And then, as we go along, we actually ratchet up the federal investment in these projects, as well as the companies do, as well. Because most of your expenditure is going to come in Phase 3, which is where you're actually breaking ground and installing concrete, steel, or actually buying the buses—these sorts of things—which we call the install and integrate phase. 

The industry is bringing in these hubs—right now, about 80% of the capital. So, the $7 billion of federal funding is roughly about—20% industry is bringing about over $40 billion into this. This is—as, I think, Malia mentioned—this is a different structure for DOE. We are now investing in very large projects, but we are actually a minority investor if you were to take it from a commercial lens. So, I mentioned, we had selected these hubs way back in October, but it's taken this long to negotiate them with the companies to get into a ward. 

Why is that? It's because these are the largest cooperative agreements in DOE's history. These cooperative agreements—as you can imagine, being selected means you have the lovely pleasure of entering negotiations with the federal government—and all of our terms and conditions—and it's a whole laundry list stacked this high. And of course, we have, roughly, within those 100 projects, 70 individual companies, or municipalities, or organizations that are part of these hubs. And all of them have their own legal staff and attorneys that need to comb through every single word of every single term and condition in these things. 

And that has taken a while as we've gone through, and we've made adjustments along the way on both sides of the fence. So, where we've ended up with these cooperative agreements is actually a very good space, I think, in terms of that partnership with industry. And it's gone well, but it just takes time when you have that many attorneys of all involved. So, like I said, most of that negotiation phase on the contracts and terms and conditions have gone through. Now we're hopeful we'll get into the final stages of getting these across the line, which the first three have already done. 

And as Ramsey said, there is the additional demand-side program that is then looking at—when some of these things get into actual operations—can you have some contracts of differences to help with price differentials, potentially, in the program. So, again to the next chart. So, I said, in these hubs, we are covering the gamut all the way from production, distribution to end use, as well as the underpinning foundation, which is the communities, and the community engagement and support. 

So, on the production side—we're seeing across the rainbow of colors in hydrogen, if you guys are familiar with that. Of course, we are mandated by Congress and the appropriations to invest in a variety of different colors of hydrogen, if you want to call it colors. We try to stay away from them. But we do have thermal projects, which is using natural gas with carbon capture. We have a lot of electrolyzer projects sourcing power from both renewables—so solar and wind—as well as—there is some nuclear sourcing of electricity to run those electrolyzers or plans. 

And we even have projects that are a bit more novel using waste streams. So, this may be a waste stream coming off of an industrial project, as my colleagues were just talking about. Or it may be taking things like municipal solid waste or woody biomass and creating hydrogen from it and waste streams. So, some novel areas there, as well. In terms of distribution, it runs across the gamut. So, we have pipelines. We have plans for trucking of hydrogen, especially to refueling stations. 
There are a few entities that are planning to do liquid hydrogen, so actually liquefy it, which allows you to transport it a bit longer distances, as well as store it for longer. And it's not necessarily in scope to the hubs, per se, today in terms of where the actual federal dollars are. But there's obviously a knock-on element around production of ammonia. We do have some ammonia production facilities, or what we call hydrogen derivatives in the portfolio. But a lot of that will also be for transportation, for long distance transportation of hydrogen. 

So, we don't have any ships, by the way, in hubs. But you can see where, especially down in areas that are near waterways, the companies are obviously looking at how they ship hydrogen around, as well, as a potential for transport. And then in end uses—what we're predominantly seeing is a lot of companies trying to change from gas firing to hydrogen firing for boilers or things that are hard to electrify in industrial processes. Of course, ammonia today is about 35% of our 10 million tons per annum of hydrogen that we produce today, which is all fossil based, or primarily fossil based. 

So, you're seeing a lot of projects where the ammonia may then get converted to urea or fertilizers to help clean up on the fertilizer side. And then a lot—as I mentioned before—on municipalities with fuel cell buses, heavy haul trucking—and port equipment, things that are hard to electrify using battery electric vehicles. We're seeing a lot in the portfolio, as well as mining equipment, for example. And then the last two I'll mention is really for power generation. So, these are peaker plants, where you're producing the hydrogen based on renewables, storing it, and then you have a peaker plant that may be gas fired, or it may be a hydrogen fuel cell to provide electricity during peak demand. 

So, we're seeing that, in the portfolio, as well as a small amount of projects that are looking at blending into natural gas networks. Now, the power side is evolving rapidly because you'll hear lots of companies talking about data centers and the power demand. If you guys drive out to Loudoun County over here, it is the data center capital of the world. And if you drive by all those data centers, each one of them will have a bank of emergency generators in case the power goes out. 

And most of those emergency diesel are diesel generators. So, we are starting to see, I think, in this space—where some of that is looking at—can you go to fuel cells and other things for backup power for data centers and things like that. And then really underpinning this—is really around the community engagement and what we call community benefits program, which is a huge part of the hubs itself. What we're seeing in that is a lot of training, and that's training not only for skilled workforce to work on these projects—as well as if you're operating a fuel cell bus, you may need to know what hydrogen is and how to handle it with a fuel cell vehicle, as well as first responders. 

Hydrogen is not new. We've been processing it since World War I in high volumes, so over a century of playing with it. What is new with the hubs is just how distributed it will be because most of that production today is in industrial centers, with petrochemical refining and ammonia production. As the hubs go out, as you get more fuel cell vehicles, et cetera, that hydrogen is going to be distributed more. So, a lot of first responders in communities that may not be near industrial centers and may not be trained up on how to deal with hydrogen, for example. So, there's a lot planned in that sort of element. 

Of course, a lot of this is around creating good-paying jobs. So, we are heavily, heavily focused on that, in terms of what the company's plans are, both in terms of construction, as well as what we call “permanent operations” roles, especially in those production-type plants. And then there is a large part around the actual impacted communities and engaging with there. What I'd say is—we've been a little bit silent because a lot of these haven't even entered into a ward. 

So, we haven't been out there as much engaging with the facilities. As these are getting into a ward, that's where we're really now starting to hit the ground, and you'll probably be hearing a lot more in terms of public engagement as we get these things into a ward. And then, of course, we are tracking and, obviously, looking at the environmental benefits. So, that looks at criteria, air pollutants and things like that, and what is the reduction going to be if we're taking x number of vehicles off of diesel and converting them over into hydrogen, these sorts of things, and making sure that we're certifying that, that we're actually having that impact that we want. 

And then, if you go to the next chart—so I mentioned about the cooperative agreement terms. That was a huge, heavy lift, and it's the reason why it's taken us a while to get to this point. As I mentioned, this portfolio is all in the very beginning stages. If you are in a typical energy company, and your portfolio of projects and pre-feed—if 30% of those got to an FID, that would be a high percentage. Now, we're hopeful in the hubs it's a much higher percentage than 30%, but it will not be 100%. That I can guarantee you, especially in Phase 1, where we have a lot of planning going on. 

So, we do expect to see where projects come in and out, and it will be somewhat of a dynamic environment as we go forward, especially in this first 18 months. That is the benefit of having a hub structure is—we have the overarching hub and individual projects may come in or out, but you still keep the whole thing moving as a whole. So that's part of the reason why we structured it as we did. 

Of course, you can't go far in hydrogen without hearing the word “45V,” which is the tax credit, which will have a large bearing in terms of, probably, what the mix is in the portfolio, et cetera. Treasury has been very tight lipped. They have a very difficult task ahead of them in terms of the interpretation of 45V. But I think there's a lot of companies waiting with bated breath to see what Treasury comes out with—their final sort of guidance for 45V. 

As I mentioned before, in the hubs, we expect to see a dynamic portfolio in this Phase 1. So, depending on where 45V goes, I think we'll be able to absorb it and handle it. But you may see some projects fall out, and other projects come in based on where that goes. NEPA is basically, our—I'll say, critical path, if you will—setting the timeline, especially in these beginning phases, Phase 1 and Phase 2. We've actually had a few subrecipients drop out because they brought a project that they had already matured into a feed stage. 

And then they came in and realized—well, if you have federal dollars, you have to go through the NEPA process, and there is just a fixed timeline associated with that. So, they realized they wanted to move faster than that, and so they just exited the hub and went on their own. So, we've seen some of that. But a large, large focus area for us in terms of how we do the NEPA with—let's face it. We got over 100 individual projects. Of course, we don't know exactly where all of them will be sited right now. So, it's a very, very interesting time for our NEPA team right now, as we're putting that strategy together. 

And as I mentioned, communication, engagement. We've heard a lot of what I'd say from some of the community's frustration because there's been—way back in October—there was the selection. And there were big announcements and publicity about it. And then things went radio silent, as we've been going over this last year. And of course, most of the public doesn't understand what is the difference between selected versus awarded. Selected just means you get the lovely benefit of negotiating with our lawyers and their lawyers to try to work out a deal. 

So, that's why I think we're primed—as we get into award—to really engage out there, because there are people kind of waiting and saying, well, what is happening. And there's this notion that all these projects are progressing, and we've been silent on it. The fact is, most of the engagement has been with attorneys while the projects just kind of sit there, waiting for the deals to be crafted. 

So, those are probably the key and salient points. I'll stop there and, hopefully, we've got some time for some questions. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thank you so much for the informative presentation and for your incredible work at OCED, which is really valuable for helping to promote hydrogen and decarbonize industry. I have a couple questions, but I'll just ask one—give other people a chance. So, you mentioned that, once these are in operation—which is a little bit down the road—you're looking at whether you can have contracts for differences to help cover operational costs. So, is that something that OCED already has funding and congressional authority for, or would that be out of the $7 billion, or out of some future year budget from OCED? And how would the contracts for difference work financially and legally? 

JAMES HAUG: That's what we're potentially contemplating with the demand-side program. So, I'll let Ramsey maybe talk to that one a bit more since he's more in depth with the demand side. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, that's right. So, it's already part of the appropriated dollars. So, all of those thoughtful supporting process—we have a lot of work to make sure that we're really complementing [inaudible] programs doing, as well. And the goal is—it would be this kind of support for those contracts for difference or a face, single face [inaudible] plant, but that it would come into play right around those projects—so they can become part of their financing packages because it's a big problem for a lot of these projects is—especially if you're looking to do project finance—they're investing. They're very simply asking what price will get the hydrogen. 

In a lot of cases, the answer is, we're not so sure, or we have this floating price off-taker philosophy there, and that's hard to underwrite that. [inaudible]. So, the goal is, the support would come into place around ID, but it would not be paid out until, probably [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: So [inaudible] projects that are already supporting the new projects. Where are these two projects? 

JAMES HAUG: That's right—the projects that are already in progress. 

SPEAKER: One thing on the distribution of hydrogen—[inaudible] will have a 5 month—of the transportation and hydrogen [inaudible]. So, my question is, what is your department doing to assist this team to develop the high quality that is needed to transport hydrogen?

SPEAKER: Yeah, so in the hubs, what we're seeing is—in certain hubs—there are pipelines planned. In fact, that's a sub project. Actually, there's many of the 100 projects that I mentioned, over 100 projects. So, there are pipelines currently being planned in most of the hubs to connect, basically, suppliers to particularly large users that may have a large volume of hydrogen that they want to consume. Then that justifies a company coming in and investing to put a pipeline in. 

Because, as I mentioned before, the companies are putting in about 80% of the capital. So, the business case needs to be justified there, but we are seeing, in pipelines, some of them may be new pipelines. Others may be retrofitting existing pipelines for hydrogen use. Those are all things being studied right now. And of course, a lot of it will be determined, also, by NEPA and the whole environmental impact, et cetera, that needs to be done. 

A lot of the pipelines just by—I'll say, timeline wise—are looking to use existing right-of-ways. And that's why you're also seeing potential retrofits, or just expansion of existing hydrogen pipelines, which exist in Texas and other places, especially where you have large refining capabilities. There are existing hydrogen pipelines. You'll start to see, probably, branch-offs of those pipelines. Yeah. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Neal Elliott [inaudible]—the question that I've got links the hydrogen feed and the hydrogen hubs. And I'll use the example that's been in the news recently, which was the SAD project, which had been looking to do an all-tanker—do a hydrogen hub. And here the hubs encountered problems. And I'm just interested in the linkage between—because this is the topic of the—[inaudible] is looking at—for the linkage between infrastructure, such as hydrogen supply, and the ability to decarbonize and the application of technologies. 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah, yeah. So, as I mentioned, in this phase, you're starting to see where projects are coming in and projects are coming out, and it's dynamic—45V is going to be a big question mark that, hopefully, gets resolved sooner rather than later. I think what you're seeing, for example, in ARCHES, which is the California hubs—we're actually seeing where the hub is there. And then you're actually seeing hydrogen projects that are not officially part of the hub but are planning to either connect to it or are in the, if you will, broader ecosystem that, for example, California is doing. 

That includes pipelines, by the way—where some of the projects, because they wanted to move out at a much faster pace and they didn't want to wait for NEPA, they've started to do that. I think there is a question on, yes, these hubs were selected to, obviously, be in regions where we also have industrial sort of capacity because we obviously realize that hydrogen will play a role in decarbonizing those, especially where you can't get electrifying. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] We're still patient with them, obviously. Once their work gets announced, I think we can have you—have another perspective for [inaudible] outbound. But I know [inaudible]—some follow-ups to questions and what folks have already asked. Not just in terms of hydrogen. One question with regard to the kind of dynamic portfolio, especially for the hubs projects [inaudible] … How does that work with finance—the actual phase timing of the wards if there are individual projects that are kind of on individual timelines but are all requiring some amount of support moving forward to reach [inaudible]. 

What's the expectation for like a set of a hub's projects, around the same time? Does that account for how are you planning to with that? And then, relatedly, since I find it is the target time for the hydrogen demand side to come in—how is that going to play to that, just individual projects versus full hubs? And then maybe one final follow up for real estate and some of the questions on other projects and the things that are using man, what's, I guess—

And with project coming in and out as you mentioned—one, assuming that coming in and out, basically— it's like whether or not you're going to receive some kind of federal support—is officially a hub or just kind a part the hub surrounding? And whether I guess that is a requirement for receiving demand-side support. It's like a fishery of hubs. And then I guess just how that's going to be dealt with as [inaudible] this happens. 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah. So, you're absolutely right. You've got over 100 projects. Those projects just based on their type, their size, their location—so, they will all be on different timelines. Now, there is some things that cause them to somewhat get joined up. One is NEPA. And just all of them are going to have to get that, unless you can get a categorical exclusion. If, for example, I'm buying a fuel cell bus that's already produced and operational around there, can you put that in? I don't know. I'm not a NEPA expert. I'll leave that up to our NEPA team. 

So, some of them may be able to go quicker, but you always have the chicken and the egg sort of element of this, as well—is, yeah, I could go buy a bus. But if I don't have anybody producing hydrogen in that region, I can't fuel it. So, some of that will drive some of the projects to go as a lump, if you will—not that they need to be in exact synchrony. I do think, though, that we will see varying projects in different hubs across going at different timelines. And we've allowed for that in the structure. That's part of the reason why I talked about the cooperative agreements. 

We have hub-specific sort of requirements, and then we have project-specific requirements to allow that latitude of projects to move slightly independently. And then on the demand-side program, I'd say it's very early days. This is still very much in the—unless, Ramsey, if you correct me if I'm wrong. We're looking at all sorts of options right now. So, we're more in a—I'll say—divergent thinking around what are all the potential options we can do. And then we've got to craft that into a design sort of to get exactly when our design period ends for the demand-side program—several months. 

SPEAKER: That's right. And the only other answer is—given the amount of capital we have for the demand-side program—obviously, it's a small fraction of the total optic needs for all of those.  And, so, there was a thought of taking all of—for this fascinating project. So, it's a front end of that curve. So, it's helping to generate momentum for the first project using FID. But we're kind of very flexible about when we launch the initiative, because right now, nothing's happening to those ideas I'm thinking. There's all kinds of other [inaudible]. 

JAMES HAUG: But you did pick up on, if there's varying FID keys, how do you—obviously, you'll have different subrecipients or organizations that maybe weren't a part of that, but they're in different maturity states. And if you're a company that wants to bid into that, you want a very solid cost estimate in terms of what your CapEx cost is—as well as what you think your operational costs are going to be—before you go into a program like that. So, that is something we are grappling—so, how we craft the design of program. 

SPEAKER: Two questions—one for community engagement. It was very small font. So, I read that there's a lot of the awardees. It's about saving jobs for job creation. There's 250,000 diesel technicians in just the U.S. Is there training? I couldn't see if that was part of the selection process. 

SPEAKER: Are you talking about overall or for any project in particular? 

SPEAKER: Oh, for all. 

SPEAKER: So my answer is—it varies by project. I think depending on—a lot of it is upscaling. So, if you're phasing to—a lot of its electrification, so not as much needed side of things. And, I'm sorry, retraining. My apologies—retraining. 

JAMES HAUG: Or reskilling. 

SPEAKER: Yeah. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, OK. So, then, yes. So, a lot of it is that—a lot of it's construction jobs. And then for [inaudible] community program jobs, some of those will come from plant workers, who are then upscaled, but a lot of them are going to be pulled from the local community to [inaudible]. So, you'll see a combination of both upscale and new workers who are then trained on site. So, yeah, I would say a combination. 

SPEAKER: OK, thank you. And then I noticed in the hydrogen hub presentation—that rail was not explicitly shown on the slide for distribution of hydrogen. And it was ammonia, and also offtake or end use. So, I'm curious if that was intentional or this— 

JAMES HAUG: Currently, in the hubs, there's no projects that are rail related. I think if you're talking about existing fertilizer plants that are now planning to source clean hydrogen into their Haber-Bosch process—most of that ammonia is—or fertilizer—if it's ammonium nitrate or other forms—is usually transported by rail. So, by default, some of this will land into where clean hydrogen, and its derivatives are transported by rail. But there are no rail-specific projects in the hubs right now. 

SPEAKER: OK. 

JAMES HAUG: It's just more of that the rail and the shipping, if you will, by ship is not—there's no scope in the hubs currently today around that. But we do know that, obviously, the people that are producing the ammonia or whatnot are going to be using that sort of infrastructure in their— 

SPEAKER: Thanks. [inaudible] You all are trying to identify one model that is [inaudible] role model, where if they're sticking to different models of defense that support that might be more spoke to whatever is the products that we're talking about. Because some things are global commodities [inaudible]. [inaudible] others that I know June was thinking about, or Alyssa was thinking about are probably services. [inaudible] 

So, what is it you're trying to hone in on one model possible, versus thinking about the options that are fitted to the [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, we're not trying to report a model. What we found with this program [inaudible]—other things that every [inaudible]. So, there's different descriptions. And the standardization for the kind of benefit [inaudible] was talking about—is actually—is DOE institutional infrastructure in place. So, one part of this program is—we're running the public interactions authority, which is a specific type of contract—people ready—that we have along the [inaudible] assets of other agencies. Other agencies had used it for things like SpaceX flights, [inaudible] developments, et cetera. 

And it allows us to be able to be flexible with how we structure those contracts, and especially [inaudible] development.

And, so, this program is in—uses of these things actually already [inaudible].  And, so, we're hoping that the learnings from that will get faster with a few—the other ones. 

SPEAKER: So, supposing that some future Congress were to reauthorize—this not just the hydrogen, but taking a step back—and the whole OCED program—the 33, now 32 facilities that are looking at the whole range, electrification, et cetera. Assuming some future Congress were to reauthorize this, what sort of tweaks would you think would be helpful to help OCED better achieve its mission? 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah, maybe I'll go first. Obviously, the primary frustration I think that we've heard from industry is—one, NEPA timeline, and two, 45V, and just getting clarity on 45V. I think a lot of people realize that, no matter what you rule on that, somebody's going to be unhappy. But industry hates uncertainty because they're going to invest $40 billion. They want to have some certainty that it's going to go forward. And they, generally—and this is a good thing—they want to move fast, which is good. That's what we want. But we have a timeline associated with NEPA. 

So, they're kind of grappling with that. So, we are looking at ways at how can we take the best approach with NEPA to ensure that we're doing the robust environmental studies and all of those things. But, at the same time, the world is emitting 4.3 million tons of CO2 every hour. Right? So, the clock is ticking. So, we also recognize that there's an environmental impact by delaying.  And, so, we're trying to, as best we can—you had mentioned—we have projects coming in and out. 

Well, if a project comes in towards—let's say, a project falls out at the end of Phase 1, which is 18 months from now because their corporate board decides they want to shift directions, or they want to go to a new location, et cetera. Well, then we go out, and we find a new project to bring into the hubs. Does that project have to start off at square one? 
Or can we do things like a programmatic approach—where to, to NEPA, at least in the first stages—such that newer projects come in—and then they can come through that at a more accelerated timeline, because maybe they have a sister project that's very analogous to it? And therefore, some of those impacts have already been assessed, right? So, those are some of the things that we're looking at to try to drive some flexibility in terms of the approach of the hubs to facilitate projects coming in and moving quicker to catch up with the other projects that have already been going [inaudible] 

SPEAKER: OK, I think that our program is so oversubscribed. We only [inaudible] over 100 applications. We're going to have a [inaudible] for you right now. But I think what we're learning from as we go through negotiations and our learning is what we will be asking for if we get more funding right. 

I think part of what has made IDP successful so far is that part of [inaudible] did a lot [inaudible] industry, and we talked to people and made sure that we could kind of meet everyone where they're at and make sure that this funding was as successful as possible.  And, so, I think the good thing for us is there is a big appetite [inaudible] out there. 

And, so, I think, kind of we're seeing that process [inaudible] evolve [inaudible] welcome all of your [inaudible] as well. It is what we're looking for right now. [inaudible]

SPEAKER: Yeah, I think—I mean, what you hear from all of us is just the timeline is quick, and it's challenging to move as quickly as the selectees want to. But I think, definitely echoing what Abby said, every project that gets awarded, it's a little bit easier. We refine the process, refine some of the documents, some of the templates. 

So, I think also, community benefits are very, very new for the selectees. It's an entirely new process. So, as selectees and maybe potential future selectees get comfortable with the fact that it is—we're taking it very seriously. It's a huge part of the project. I think it'll be easier if we're able to do this again. 

SPEAKER: Actually, what you [inaudible] greatest segue. I have a couple questions on community interface plans.  And, so, again [inaudible]. 

So, just like—would expect and you all are going to expect, that as the projects are awarded as they proceed, they're going to be able to report out [inaudible], successes, challenges, really detailing, documenting what they found with [inaudible]. Is there going to be that same level of report out briefing regarding social considerations and workforce training as opposed to saying, yes, we did train x amount of technicians in this manner? Or we did get a signed-off agreement with communities beyond that, literally reporting back on the efficacy of it—lessons learned. Is it that same level of requirement on the projects to report out on the findings [inaudible]? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, so, at the end of each—at the end of negotiations and then [inaudible], we will publish, on our website, the same material, a fact sheet or something like that. And then in terms of further—and it'll say this—kind of the same standard across all projects similar to what we have already. And then beyond that, each project will have its own set of—typically, it's a website that they publish themselves—their own kind of set of criteria that they can report on more frequently, but typically we will ask for at the end of each phase. 

And then for some projects, where they have a [inaudible] reward or benefits agreement, there may be additional reporting or just sharing of meeting minutes or things like that will come as they choose or as they meet things like that. But yeah, there will be kind of information that we ask for that we publish across all projects. And then it kind of depends on what their individual events look like to ensure we kind of come up more frequently or what types of information are published. And that's typically going to be on the [inaudible] websites. 

JAMES HAUG: The community benefits from a large part of what we're evaluating, not only for the original selection and award, but as was mentioned, for each key gate—we have a decision as DOE whether we're going to proceed forward and actually fund that project, right? Put our allocation. I would say over a third of our considerations of all the things—you can imagine a typical project. 

You're thinking about, well, what does the design look like? Are the finances there? Do you have the supply chain? 
All the project-related and economic sort of considerations—but over a third of our considerations are community benefits in each of those phases. And it's going to be particularly important at the end of Phase 1 and then, of course, going into Phase 2 because that is where all of a sudden, you're actually going to get—a lot of the jobs are actually created in Phase 3, when you start building things, actually, right? 

So, the companies right now, as part of Phase 1, they have to detail out their community benefits. They put in, into their original application, this is what we are notionally thinking about community benefits. But this phase in particular is really about sharpening the pencil on what exactly are they going to do where, et cetera. 

And, some of that's TBD just because the project locations are TBD right now. So, if you say, well, what's my impacted community. Well, I don't really just yet because I haven't—some of these companies are still trying to figure out where they want to put their electrolyzer or this or that. They have multiple options right now. 

Within even a hub, they have multiple locations that they can choose from. So, they kind of have to finalize that, and then they tailor it specific to the community—impacted community that they're going to go into. And we also have, obviously, Justice40 and all those factors as well in our community benefits plans—large part of it as well. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] OK, and the other part is just leverage. So right now, we understand y'all are representing [inaudible] the subcommittee meeting. How much are—and I know each office—I think each office has its own lane as far as [inaudible] management, administration, or what have you. Within the Department of Energy, within this department as far as the different offices and even externally with other agencies like Department of Labor, Department of Education, how much leverage is there being attempted right now to try to [inaudible] some and really cross-pollinate with lessons learned and things [inaudible]? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, so, good question. I can only speak obviously for our experience, but I know that all of the offices under the S3, the [inaudible] infrastructure office, have been coordinating really closely in their office. They have a few people who their job is to oversee this implementation. 

I know that they work with—I don't know about education, but I've been in contact with the Department of Labor on a few things. I don't know the extent if there's a working group or anything of that nature. I don't know if there's one [inaudible] kind of established within a regular cadence yet. But I do know that we're trying to be attentive [inaudible]. We can, first of all within DOE, [inaudible] our vertical and then with other departments as well. I think it's new and it's hard, and I think we're all trying to talk to each other as—yeah. 

SPEAKER: And also, just note. Yesterday, I actually sat in on an all-day training for people who are working on community benefits, and that was DOE-wide. So, we heard from people from other departments where things work a little bit differently. And one thing I'll note actually about your first question is that integrating community benefits into the phased approach, having it at every single phase, is not the case across all the programs. 

And that was very intentional so that community benefits are really upheld—are a part of the go, no-go process instead of being just a standalone static document. So, I think there is definitely an effort. And I know this training was very successful, and there was a lot of enthusiasm to open it up to more people. So, I think people are realizing that we're all getting different learnings through all of our various processes. And I think that that will be, especially once we get through awards, I think that'll be really critical to try and share some of those learnings. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Back to sort of where [inaudible] have been grazing on, also very cognizant of what's going on with CHIPS awards, the [inaudible] that's out there. And one of the challenges that many of the sites— TSMC, Intel, and others—are experiencing related to workforce is actually the recruitment of the workforce, primarily the operational workforce.  And, so, this is just the [inaudible]—is pointing out this is a multiyear activity. As we look to projects moving from Phase 1 to Phase 2 and the stage gaining, I mean, you had indicated that that type of effort of workforce [inaudible] in Stage 3. Is it appropriate to think about [inaudible], including that in Stage 2 because of the concerns about lead times, on developing a large workforce that needs to either be recruited or [inaudible]? 

JAMES HAUG: Absolutely, absolutely. So, today, if I were to back up, a year ago, the average—and I'll just use the energy sector right now. The average energy sector project was 40% behind on engineering in their typical phase. 
It's the highest it's probably been in decades, that sort of delay and lag. And it's because a lot of the engineering and procurement companies were hollowed out over the last—certainly during COVID. There were a lot of retirements, as well as—if you were in the energy industry when oil and gas prices sank in 2015—there was a prolonged period. 

So, you now have a generational retraining of a lot of engineers, NEMP companies. And that's pretty worldwide. So that's problem point number one—is engineers. Now, you mentioned also, for example, construction craft. 

Technical trades have always been very, very thin, especially over the last 2 decades. So, regardless of community benefits and what DOE is coming down with, the companies have to have a plan—and probably in the early phases of doing a regional survey of what the trades and skills are in their area where they're going to build the project. But almost every project that I've been involved with has had to have some sort of training program, because even if you have trades and qualified welders, you always need more welders, and you always need to then train them up. 

And, so, that is going to be a big, big part of the hubs program and what we're looking for in a lot of these projects, because we know if they're not paying attention to it now, they don't get the people skilled up in Phase 2. When they hit Phase 3 in construction, which is your most expensive period and where you're burning the most amount of money, you can easily fall off a cliff because you didn't pay attention to the craft that you have. And then, of course, the same is true of the operations. 

The craft for the construction is a bit difficult because you need a large number of people in a finite period.  And, so, it's this big peak, and then it drops off. Whereas operations, at least you've got the steadiness of it, right, which is good. But each has their own factors that you have to deal with. But that is absolutely on the radar screen because it's probably one of the top risks for our projects just in general within the industry [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] So, part of what we look for in Phase 1, again, as you mentioned—it's the planning phase. But what we look for is some sort of training and staffing plan, [inaudible] so that typically covers construction and operations. 
And, so, this, again, by a project-by-project basis … Some have existing relationships with building trades unions, [inaudible] unionized workforce [inaudible] and some may choose to go through—continue those relationships and use unionized workers. For those who don't, something else that we look for Phase 1 and Phase 2 initially [inaudible] met with labor unions. Whether or not their workers tend to be in the United States [inaudible] a question. 

But, at least look for that as part of Phase 1. And they [inaudible] overall various based on [inaudible]. Some of these projects are way further along. You're talking about [inaudible] or new ones. But that is something that we look forward [inaudible] Phase 1 is some sort of phase, both in terms of [inaudible]. 

JAMES HAUG: We're also looking at the subrecipient. Those are the people that will actually build the project, companies, or organizations. We also look at—are they an established player that's done lots of these types of projects before, and maybe they've been burnt by recent battle scars associated with this. 

And therefore, they're probably going to pay attention to it just naturally. But we also have companies in this mix that are startup organizations that probably have never done a large project like this. They may have a few folks that they bring on board. 

That's where we're going to zero in on our sort of a risk-based strategy, if you will, to say, do they really know what they're getting into? Do they understand what it is to get the craft and especially in a region where a lot of these sort of areas may be—for example, ammonia production—tends to be in the heartland, right? Tends to be an agricultural area as well. 
Your craft is not like the Gulf Coast or major industrial centers. So, you can easily deplete, with a large project, easily deplete the craft and trades in that region. So, what's your plan to go deal with that? So, these are some of the things that will absolutely be on the radar screen, especially as we get towards, I'll say, the latter portion of Phase 1, when the planning is starting to solidify a bit. 

SPEAKER: Yes. 

DAVID: Hi, I'm David [inaudible] energy above [inaudible] about 2 weeks ago, [inaudible] had a recommendation on—that you may want to take a look at. If you have [inaudible] some of the things that Dr. [inaudible] had brought up about coordination between the different departments [inaudible] the metrics that you looked at that [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: Thank you. I think [inaudible] time for break [inaudible]. 

JAMES HAUG: Yes, so we're going to take a 15-minute break. We will resume at 10:33—give everybody the full 15 minutes. 

We'll be happy to help people find their way out and back to this room [inaudible]. But for everyone online, we'll see you in 15 minutes. Thank you. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible]

JAMES HAUG: Show of hands, who was at the workshop? Two [inaudible] OK. 

SPEAKER: It was an interesting event. 

JAMES HAUG: Great. All right, thank you, Zach. And realizing I'm—I'll try not to get in the way of your little [inaudible] room. So, I think for this morning, and if I recall, I've got until what time, Zach? [inaudible] 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, we're going until about 11:15. It was 45 minutes.

JAMES HAUG: OK. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, I think 11:20 or something. 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah, I'll try to stay on track here, and we'll see how this goes. We thought for the second meeting, it would be valuable. We heard a request to hear more about some of the stakeholder input that we've received. 

So, this morning, I'll touch on the work we've been doing as a follow-on to the industrial decarbonization roadmap, which we refer to as our pathways for U.S. industrial transformations. So, I'll give a few slides on this vision study overview. We are writing a report now. Our goal is to publish this report by the end of this calendar year. 

It's a lot of work to get it all through the concurrence processes because this isn't all of DOE reports. This is not just a kind of a report coming out of IDEO. So we think. It's a pretty important next step. 

And then I will talk to some of the high-level outcomes and output from the stakeholder engagement process. So, these will be high-level summaries, and we'll touch on the cross-cutting topics, nontechnical challenges, and then the subsector-specific overview. So, there are six subsectors that we're addressing and doing targeted modeling in this pathway vision study. 

And we really wanted to make sure we got some feedback for those specific industrial subsectors, as well as all of the kind of rest of industry collectively. And we also ran a request for information, and we're only able to kind of provide high-level snapshots. As you can imagine, that kind of information comes in, and we have to be kind of anonymized and just agglomerate that information together. 

OK, next slide. OK, so a quick review, reminder—we ran—we published this industrial decarbonization roadmap in the fall, almost exactly just a little over 2 years ago. There have been several years of work that went into that roadmap, and it was really the first of—big piece of work that DOE put out in this space. 

So, as a reminder, we looked at CO2 emissions from the industrial sector for these five sectors—cement, food products, food and beverage—third, iron and steel—chemicals, and then petroleum refining. We focused on those five industrial subsectors, and we looked only at the energy-related CO2 emissions. About a third of the energy demand in the country and 30% of energy-related CO2 emissions are attributable to the industrial sector. Next slide. 

However, for this roadmap—for this pathways study and report—we've opened the lens to try to make sure we're more holistic in including all not only energy-related greenhouse gas emissions but looking across the multiple datasets and including the full range of CO2 equivalents. And when you look at all of that across all of the industrial subsector, it's about 30% of the emissions footprint of the United States—is attributable—of all those emissions—are attributable to the industrial sector.  And, so, the industrial sector, of course, includes the heavy, energy-intensive industries. 

There's also a long tail of manufacturing that is part of the industrial sector. There's also nonmanufacturing industrial sector, which is included. That is farms, construction, gas and mining, and supporting activities. 

And, so, that is also a pretty big footprint. And when you take a look at energy-related emissions and non-energy-related emissions, for example, it's not surprising that in farms, the non-energy-related emissions are a big contributor there. Big footprint—and that footprint is attributable to the non-energy-related emissions. 

So, that's the context. That's what we're looking at, and we're really trying to make sure we're looking at all of that. That allows for us to think more holistically about all of the technology options that are needed to remedy those emissions. Next slide. 

OK, so, third reminder here that the approach and the framework that we developed for the industrial decarbonization roadmap, we're still applying it. It still holds up. And we think that it's gained a lot of traction. If you see how industry, other stakeholders speak about kind of these levers, these pillars of industrial decarbonization, number one, energy efficiency, also industrial electrification, the use of low carbon fuels, low carbon feedstocks, and low carbon energy sources as well as the use of carbon capture utilization and storage. 

So, reminder, these are the five sectors we focused on in the roadmap, but they still hold up for the work that we're doing, and we've seen others use these sort of approaches, these pillars, these strategies for communicating how you can achieve industrial decarbonization within and across the industrial [inaudible] sectors. Next slide. OK, so moving on to a little bit more with the pathways study—and there's a lot there. This is going to be a very voluminous report. 

I thought it would be valuable for us to highlight what you could expect to see. So, one of the ways I try to explain what we're doing with the pathways is that we're extending and expanding the work that we did in the roadmap. So, you heard about the CO2 emission, energy-related CO2 emissions, and all greenhouse gas emissions. The levers, if you—for those—I think everybody here is probably familiar with the roadmap work. 

You can see these waterfall charts that show by [inaudible] the potential. And that is a way to kind of— one way to think about how you can agglomerate buckets of decarbonization potential looking at your pathway over time between now and 2050. So, we're doing this with a bit more granularity, essentially on an annual basis. So, the models are much more detailed.

They're still Excel-based spreadsheet models, but they are kind of crazy, complex, big Excel spreadsheet models. The core scenario—one way to think about this—is that it is our first, best assessment of those technologies that can drive us on a very low carbon path. From that, we ran a number of sensitivity analyses to look at the relative potential for greater or lesser amounts of hydrogen or electrification. 

So, you can think about the core scenario as one combination of technologies and then sensitivities around that that can drive us out. So, this sensitivity analysis to help us really quantify those low to near-zero pathways. So, we've extended and expanded the roadmap approach. We've engaged with a broader cross section of stakeholders, and we'll talk about that in the subsequent slides, a deeper assessment of the barriers to really inform the sensitivity analysis. 

We developed what we think is a useful construct for explaining, number one, the model frameworks that we have. And we'll show you this—when we refer to as, in some contexts, the model framework, in other contexts, the decision tree. These decision trees, I think, can be adaptable by others to help think through what their more specific decarbonization pathways can look like. 

And we've increased the resolution of the analysis to chart a number of pathway options. So, it's a systems challenge. We need to be looking at the unit operation level to the facility level and beyond the plant bounds. 

We need to be able to look at both the energy systems—but the materials flows. There's a lot more that we're trying to fold into this work—if not quantitatively, at least qualitatively—that will help us set up for future work that we're planning, things like environmental and social considerations. And we really recognize the need to coordinate to make this actionable, this work actionable, to coordinate within, across, and outside of industry. 

So, we talked about—we have some definitions. We'll be—you can really see some more of that in [inaudible]. OK, next slide. 

So, we're kind of leaning into a definition that we put into the roadmap for pathways. These are really— when we think about the actions that will be needed to be taken by this country, whether you're an individual organization, a facility—these are specific actions needed to achieve that progress in and across the pillars while remaining informed and supplemented by research, development, demonstration, deployment, ultimately to advance viable solutions that will need to be adopted at scale. 

And you guys know this now. I mean, you've seen in our first meeting and today input from across the department on how we're trying to do that, well, in [inaudible] we're really focused on applied research and development. But some amount of tech assistance and other approaches to engage with industry with other offices that work more broadly. So, things like looking deeply at major production routes to get to those emissions reductions, the factors that can impact how facilities will evaluate and choose technologies, are part of our sensitivity analysis. We're trying to include that more explicitly. 

The timing of technology deployments—the models have worked in a technology adoption curves that can be adjusted and adapted, things like major uncertainties, risks, and barriers and considering things like greenfield versus brownfield approaches—next slide. OK, so a little more high-level slide here. Reminder, it's not only the roadmap. 

We talked about that quite a bit because we led that out of our office. But there are other work that you guys are fully aware of, the pathways to commercial liftoff for industrial decarbonization and some of the other liftoff reports that really drove into much deeper kind of cost analysis and cost modeling. Our approach with the roadmap and with this pathways is to really try to make sure we keep that broad vision, that broad perspective on things that we will need to do, especially to the extent that upwards of two-thirds of the technologies that we will need to deploy to get to those very low to near-zero pathways are just not developed yet. 

They need to be developed. And we can speculate about modeling the cost on those, but that's pretty challenging to do. So, we can really see things like the decarbonization pathways reports being updated with some frequency. We expect those folks to continue to do that, to keep on top of that as advancements are made over time.

OK, so technological, economic, societal, and environmental health impacts of industrial transformation— we are trying to capture in this report that it is more than the technologies, and we'll talk about that a little bit more to the next slide. All right, so I mentioned a little bit earlier that we developed this concept of a decision tree, and you'll hear a little bit more about some of the feedback we received during the workshop and in the RFI about things like the decision tree.

So, these have been adjusted. You'll kind of notice here—this is a very generic—we've developed this for each of the industrial subsectors that we've taken a look at. 

For example, and you'll see a comment that we received where we had a kind of a more linear approach. Do this, then do this, then do this. Even though we kind of message this—that these decision trees are meant to be adaptable, and they are—we kind of parallelize some of these to say, “OK, these things need to be considered in parallel, and the relative amounts or things that can be done as one is considering this and iterating through this process over time.”

This also, if you click one more time, I think there's one tiny animation. This also represents basically our model framework.

And, so, we have these frameworks that represent what is in our models as well as potentially useful as a tool for others to use going forward in time for their specific uses.

OK, next slide. All right, I mentioned this before. This is one of those high-level—you'll see this chart in the pathways report. We want to not only capture what's clipped off at the bottom, the technical angle, the technical perspective, and the economics—and DOE is pretty good at [inaudible].

Think about the liftoff reports and the technical pieces. But the environmental and health issues, DOE is also actually quite good at that but has not necessarily applied as much in the environmental and health impacts area as in context with the industrial sector. There's some of those.

You can think about air quality and emissions and modeling the [inaudible] and transport of pollutants. Really leaning into that is work that I think needs to be done more holistically over time. That is particularly important and the societal impact. 
And this is something that we have actually leaned into quite a lot with the work running up into this report. OK, next slide. OK, any questions on that before I kind of move into the RFI and the stakeholder engagements? Yeah. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, this is obviously at the national level, some of the analysis we're doing suggesting that most of the industrial development is occurring in 15, 18 states and where we are in each of those regions is quite different. Is there a regional sort of segmentation overlay to some of the work you're doing yet? 

JAMES HAUG: There is an assessment to an extent, and it's not necessarily as equivalent across the models themselves for the regional considerations. For example, for carbon capture and sequestration, as far as the inputs go, is the proximity to geologic storage rational and reasonable? These were utilized to inform the potential input, uptake of certain technologies. 

There is a—I would say there is a very valuable need to see this kind of pathway—that's right—broken down and applied almost sort of in a layered and sequential way going forward. I think this sets the stage for that type of work to be done. In the context also of—what's the word—teaching people to fish and not necessarily doing it—there is something that could be taken by others from this to apply this kind of thinking approach in a more targeted way like you're saying. Yeah. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Quick question. Alongside the report, will you be releasing the Excel models as supplementary materials? 

JOE POWELL: This is a great question. My absolute intent is absolutely, yes. It will probably take us a little bit more time to clean those up to make them ready for public consumption. 

But I think, in the interest of getting not only those decision trees and the associated model frameworks available in the hands for complete transparency—and we really do want people to run these models themselves and say, “Well, OK, we see what your assumptions are, but we can dial those knobs up and down?” There's something else that—I'll make the comment right now that is kind of interesting. For some people that have been tracking this, we've been working on this for quite a while. 

And where are we now? This is almost November. In the spring, we had what we inside the building call roadmap 2.0 models. We actually have really advanced those after the input we received from the RFI and the workshop, and we refer to them now as roadmap 3.0 models. We have advanced them far enough. 

And, some of the advancements we've made are allowing more user inputs directly and more easily into those models to allow them to be more user friendly. We're rethinking, for example, technology managers in our office or across the departments like, well, here's an emerging technology. How do I include that? 

And these models are now designed and set up to allow for that kind of input. So, yes. OK, let's jump into some of the input that we received. 

So, we had a workshop in May. We know a couple of folks attended. We ran a request for information. 

Note to anyone who's ever interested in trying to do an RFI and a workshop in exactly the same time— don't do that. That's a terrible, terrible idea. And then we actually—based in part on input that we received during the May workshop—we ran a subsequent online workshop to look more closely at energy equity and environmental justice, often decarbonizing industrial sector. OK, and there are links here, and you can find content, lots of content online. 

So, I've got quite a lot of slides that have some words on them. I will try to just maybe emphasize some of—kind of the key takeaways. I think it's even helpful just for context. 

What did we do in the workshop—just so you kind of know the kind of information we were trying to pull in? Well, the morning of the first day was actually quite a—for those that were there, was actually quite a great—for example, this panel, Envisioning a Net Zero Future, David Turk is the undersecretary, directly reports to Secretary Granholm. Carolyn Snyder, our deputy assistant secretary [inaudible]. 

JAMES HAUG: Sorry, Joe. If you could just make sure to speak up a little bit, I think the audio is going in and out. And it might help for you to be in front of the camera instead of. 

JOE POWELL: Oh. 

JAMES HAUG: I have no idea. 

JOE POWELL: All right. 

JAMES HAUG: You don't have to look at the camera, but just for your body to be physically in front of it could help. 

JOE POWELL: Is this— 

JAMES HAUG: Or to talk towards It might help even more. Yeah. 

JOE POWELL: All right. I don't want to get in folks' way. Does this work? Can I get a feedback from people online if you're able to hear me? 

JAMES HAUG: [inaudible] Not sure, David or Joe—or if anyone can comment on if that helps. 

JOE POWELL: I'm going to get up here, and I'm going to get in folks’ way.  And, sorry about that. 

SHARON NOLEN: [inaudible] 

JOE POWELL: Like, what? 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] 

JOE POWELL: Oh, I can do that too. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] 

JAMES HAUG: Joe, [inaudible]. 

JOE POWELL: You can hear well. OK, so all right. Just to move quickly through this, basically, the morning was introductions. 

And we had some really nice input from folks, and I thought that was quite valuable to set the stage. Kind of a classic DOE workshop approach. That afternoon on Tuesday and the following day, we had activities that we focused on cross-cutting discussions, nontechnical discussions on nontechnical aspects. 

And then really, the kind of meat and potatoes of the workshop, these sector-specific facilitated discussions. So, you can picture experts going out into their own respective rooms for iron and steel and other areas that—think was quite valuable. So, these were highly facilitated discussions. Next slide. 

Yeah, these were highly facilitated discussions where we were driving input from folks that we really wanted to make sure was useful for informing this pathway study that we were working on. So, these were three rotations of 50-minute facilitated discussions, topical breakout rooms. So, very kind of flash presentations, 5 minutes, to remind people and get folks aware. In advance of this workshop, there was information provided. So, we expected people to be well informed when they showed up. 

So, we had questions with respect to things like the challenges and the barriers to help inform these study scenarios and sensitivities. And the breakout rooms were on carbon capture utilization and storage, electrification of the grid, energy efficiency, hydrogen and other types of low carbon fuels, feedstocks and energy sources, materials efficiency, and natural resources. So, when you look at that list, things like the first four are—think about the industrial decarbonization roadmap but getting more deeply into areas like material efficiency and natural resources and then into topics like environmental justice and community considerations. 

These are really kind of new inputs that we receive from stakeholders. So, some examples of high-level takeaways that for resource intensity to decarbonize industry, it's going to be a change, a transformation to do this. It's going to have impacts on our natural resources. 

We want to keep a focus on greenhouse gas emissions, but we have to be aware of and think about and ensure that we're not having unintended consequences to our water, land, minerals—that are anticipated. And things like resource availability or the competition, quality, community impacts, these are all important. The infrastructure to do this—I mean, I don't have to tell anybody in this room. 

We heard a lot from OCED this morning on this very important topic but also things like data availability, transparency, and standardization. There is a lot of advancements that need to happen to better inventory and track emissions and account for carbon in a way that is really going to drive true change and not maybe sort of shifting from one place to another and really drive actual, complete, and absolute emissions reductions. OK, next slide. 

So, for the nontechnical facilitated discussions, we had a theme of looking at the uncertainty around things like the value of decarbonization as considered by actors across the industrial supply chains and communities. So, for example, these challenges could include demonstrating what the value is of clean energy across the value chains and the issue of having a lack of data availability and transparency to make calculations on this. So, what are some example approaches or solutions to help overcome this and get the message out and inform people? 

Amplifying success stories, really doing detailed and harmonized comparative analysis through things like life cycle assessments—we also have on this workshop and subsequent to this—and we know our colleagues at EPA, for example, are leaning heavily into things like product category rules and environmental product declarations. So, there's a lot of work that's actually going on in the space to help improve some of these issues on data quality and transparency that exist across the industrial sector. And this can provide that analytical basis for everyone to make plans. Without that foundation, it's difficult to plan. 

So, some of the example metrics, dollars per unit of CO2—that allows us to think about things like a levelized cost of carbon reduction. Of course, things like jobs—what is a net social impact, the length of time for permitting? So, there's a lot of metrics that could be looked at across the range, not just in that kind of greenhouse gas accounting area but much more—and things like projects announced versus those that are completed. 

You heard a little bit today about selection and then award and then pre-feed studies and feed studies and then what's happening. Understanding the actual stage and state of these projects—we all think about things like carbon capture, utilization, and storage is we've been talking about it for decades. 

But how much is that [inaudible] costs? All of that, I think, needs a lot more tracking to be done. So yeah, so what are the most pressing nontechnical barriers? These are just some examples of what some of those look like. 

OK, next slide. All right, subsector-specific facilitated discussion. So, these were kind of those deeper dives into those areas. In each of those sessions, we introduced that decision tree. So, we saw a generic one earlier, but these targeted ones that are actually much more robust. 

The feedback we receive from that has actually driven us to adopt, adapt, and update those quite a lot. So, we heard inputs that was kind of similar in terms of the sequencing. How do you think about which things to come online and [inaudible] efficiency first, last, and always, right? It's all the time. You're always doing efficiency. 

How do you capture those things in a graphic and apply that? Our waterfall charts—there were some reflection on that as well, that the sequence of the waterfall efficiency and then low carbon fuels and feedstocks—why this before that? Why electrification before low carbon fuels and feedstocks? And in some cases, we're simply constrained by the way you're representing data. We think that our newer results, context, and figures that we’ll be showing will help address some of those kinds of questions and show some of the sensitivities that go into that, depending on if you lean more towards hydrogen or less towards hydrogen—depending on more towards electrification or less towards electrification—being able to see that. So, the production routes and assumptions providing that flexibility that may not yet exist, and to Jeffrey's question about will the will the models being available and that—yes. And, so, this idea of being able to provide flexibility to incorporate technologies is really important. We see this as particularly valuable. 

I think the other just very quick comment as well. We have done and we will also be publishing probably over the next year what I refer to as sectoral assessments. So, we're only able to capture a several-hundred-page report. When you think about the number of subsectors we're looking at, let's call it 20 or 30 pages for each of these subsectors, we actually have much more detailed analysis. You can almost think about these as the glorified appendices that will be published later, that will go into all of those assumptions and inputs and production routes and much more robust sensitivity analysis. So, that will be coming out also. So, not only the models, but more detailed publications. 

So, some of these sensitivities, we mentioned a number of these things and these sensitivities can be— some of them are modeled a little bit more or less explicitly or a little bit more as inputs to the models. So, you assume—make certain assumptions and inputs and go from there. 

OK, let's move on. So, here are some examples, and I want to keep this tight on time and maybe zip through these in the interest of time. So, a few things. Carbon capture utilization is a key pillar for cement decarbonization. The low carbon fuels feedstocks—we need to determine the share of emissions abatement from fuel switching versus low carbon feedstocks, so things like supplemental cementitious materials, et cetera. 

And the input that we received from the workshop, for example, and other stakeholder input has caused us to go back and rebuild and work on those models to be able to capture more of an understanding of what the demand may look like, forecast—you think about your baseline, what's going into the demand— given this sort of demand, what might we see with things like supplemental cementitious materials to be able to build that in, and getting really that feedback on, what could we anticipate? 

Given this is a highly regulated sector—for example, in terms of where “regulators” may be too strong of a word—but the requirements for certain types of cement with certain physical performance characteristics to be able to be used—being able to test those and thinking about what it will take over time for that types of products, maybe with alternative chemistries or alternative compositions to be taken up in the marketplace—so these types of things are important. 

And, so, we have challenges with all of these areas, whether we're deploying low carbon inputs, those prescriptive building codes that I just was referring to—there's no one-size-fits-all solution for things like carbon capture, utilization, and storage … And this gets a bit to Neal's point about geographical features and regionality and things like the CapEx—the upfront cost of installing new technologies. And, some of the things we're frankly seeing is that these big investments that are being made by us in this area are driving some change at a couple of facilities, but it's not going to be enough to incentivize. There's more incentive that will be needed for other facilities to be able to really go deeply into decarbonizing in this sector. 

So, a number of example approaches and solutions—education, standards, demand-side incentives, coordination … We talked about the hubs already—scale up and to reduce costs for cement and concrete products. We want to look at those learning curves and rights law for driving the cost down stronger and longer. Demand-side incentives, production, investment and credits and federal support is important. So this is kind of feedback that we received from stakeholders. Next slide. 

So, chemicals—it's complex. There's a lot of dynamics with respect to feed stocks. The production of high-volume chemicals is a big part of what we're looking at. You can think of the ethylene and the ammonia, but there's an enormously long tail and an entire supply chain of a way these chemicals are sequenced as precursors to others. That is very, very complicated. And there can be a lot of market shifts that affect things like availability and pricing that goes into this. 
Retrofitting challenges for complex plants in particular—there's an enormous amount of not just the investment that's there, but the complexity and everything is dialed in. It's like a perfectly tuned Ferrari. It's just doing everything perfectly. You start to mess with one part, and other areas can go to pieces. And the costliness to make those changes is particularly challenging. 

So back to Neal's point. Centralized—for example, those Gulf Coast assets, the cost of technologies and deployment in the marketplace. Some approaches to that—supporting the demand, similar to cement and concrete, adopting inexpensive feedstocks is one approach. It has its challenges, of course, determining the costs and impacts to incentivize chemical products and report to Congress to justify why products need to be incentivized. These are just examples of input that we received from stakeholders. 

And that the regional markets for certain agrochemicals—I think we talked about the regionality with respect to sequestration, but of course, the inputs on the input side as well is particularly something to be considered. 

Next slide. 

CELINA HARRIS: Trying to get into the transition from fossil-fuel-fueled combined heat and power to what is going to replace that. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: For combined heat and power only or chemicals more broadly as far as inputs? The specific—was it— 

CELINA HARRIS: Specifically talking about combined heat and power. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Combined heat and power? Yeah. Was there our program? I think folks are aware through our tech assistance and workforce development pillar has invested in combined heat and power for many, many decades. A lot of work in that area. The approach there, I think—and this opens that lens to things I think that we've even talked about early and maybe even in the first in-person meeting, this kind of balance between locking in certain technologies that may be very efficient now, and what is that input, or what is the consequence of making those changes earlier? And I think there's a couple of ways to think about this. 

Some of these assets are extremely expensive—make a completely new giant facility, chemicals facility, that is going to depend on a new way of taking these inputs. And by the heat and power equipment is not cheap, but it's also not one of these ginormous investments. So, it can be a part of—the thinking there is what is the size of that investment? How adaptable is that particular technology to other forms of combustion? Can you do co-firing? Hydrogen—so investing in the R&D to look at more low carbon inputs into the specific technology, into specific mining power—prime movers. 

I think that there's more, I think, to be kind of looked at with respect to that. We are, when we begin to look at, for example, biomass as an input some of the indicators out there, the studies in the literature— that there is enough biomass, in theory, in this country to provide all the inputs into the chemical sector. You also have the transportation sector and you have other areas. So, whatever that resource is, how constrained it's going to be over time, I think is part of that calculation. 

I think these are considerations that from a sort of a centralized report, we're going to—we can make some—we can draw attention to those. But I think a lot of those decisions are going to be down to the individual facilities. 

JOE POWELL: Going back—and this is a conversation that I've had with Kate Scott when she was at OTT, and then with Felicia Lucci—one of the things that we were talking about was looking at value chains and the potential for disruption of those value chains. So a lot of times we'll look at the primaries— sorry, going down to a commodity product that is not a commodity product, but our final product, can we disrupt that by introduction of some other intermediary in that, which then obviates, for example, [inaudible] production need for propylene or some other primary—the BTX—disrupt the BTX chain? And is that in this model and considered? 

So, I think—so we have models that I would say not explicitly—currently we're at that point where some of that is totally endogenous or done, but we do have models that will look at supply chains and the inputs and outputs from each step. So, for example, one of the tools that we developed started well over a decade ago, called The Materials Flows Through Industry Tool that [inaudible] has the recipes. 

And then there's a particular amount of robustness in the chemical sector for those recipes through supply chains. And that allows us to be able to look at that and compare supply chains versus another. But these become very, very challenging. And I think the state of technology—the state of modeling in these areas, more dynamic analyzes that need to be done to really look at those. There's other—there's a lot of other work being done by folks that are looking at—using agent-based modeling to look at some of these kinds of questions. And I think there's—I don't think there's any single model that's going to provide that insight. I think you have to tap into a range of modeling to really understand it. Joe raised his hand, by the way, on that. 

Joe Powell. Joe Powell. Did you have a question? If you're speaking, I think you're on mute. I don't think we can hear you. 

No, we cannot hear you. Not hear you. Maybe, Joe, if you're able to type that into chat. Chat? Is that right? OK, that's OK. We can read it out if he types it into chat. Sorry, Joe. You do. You're showing as unmuted, but we can't hear. 

SPEAKER: That doesn't show that his mic is registering on his computer. 

SPEAKER: OK. While we wait for that question to come in, maybe in the interest of time—I know we're kind of getting close to time. We'll hit on a couple more examples of some of the input—iron and steel input—we've received. It's really unclear what role electrolysis will play to make iron. These are examples of things that are really hard to understand. It looks really interesting. But until we get more advanced on those curves, we're really not going to have a deep understanding of what that potential looks like. Things like the quality and availability of scrap demand changes, it was brought up, considering the clean energy infrastructure build out. What do these large infrastructural changes look like and what might that look like to build out the transmission lines and the wind turbines and everything else that can go into this and how this may affect demand? And by the way, it's not only iron, steel, chemicals that feed into precursors that go into the resins for carbon fiber reinforced composite wind turbine blades. I mean, you can think about a lot of these other areas—aluminum, other lightweighting materials, and metals as well. 

So, things like challenges—the deterioration of the scrap quality and quantity—whereas this is what is the future for that look like—the availability of carbon alternatives for electric ARC furnaces and natural gas, carbon electricity with EAF as well.  And, so, a range of these approaches and solutions—prioritizing and developing removal technologies for those impurities—work with processors to provide cleaner post-consumer scrap work with automakers to make extraction of copper easier, unless this sort of design with intent in advance and produce that way. 

Develop product designs for lower copper scrap, development of alternative sources, things like bio carbon, bio chargers, bio polymers, and funding industry and projects to test these alternatives and improving efficiency, electrifying reheat furnaces. So, of course, grid decarbonization is an underlying requirement and things like bio carbon is an alternative carbon source. So, these are, again, some example input that we received rolled up to a relatively high level. Don't think people in this room—don't think everyone in this room is quite aware of a number of these approaches, especially those with expertise in these areas. 

But it is in some ways, I think, useful to get even those side conversations and input of well, we think, the assumptions, and this might be too high or too low. And that is helpful for us to put information out there. And then get the feedback from folks in terms of our assumptions that have gone into the models. OK. Move forward. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: And just before we go to the next slide, just note that Joe put into the chat that he is planning to present on the topic you were discussing—the chemical slide during the report out from the subcommittee on industrial sectors. So, I think— 

ZACH PRITCHARD: We'll come back to that discussion. Great. Thanks, Joe. I look forward to that. That's great. 

JOE POWELL: Can you hear me now? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: We can hear you. We can. Yeah. 

JOE POWELL: I think it's a great presentation. [inaudible] I would just comment that report will talk about circularity needs as part of the game changer there. And then industry has already done some studies on biomass versus CO2 utilization along with the National Academy study report on the latter. But looking at the Energy requirements and the thermodynamics, a lot of these pathways are going to be more energy intensive and expensive than just starting from petroleum to begin with. And, so, we've got a bit of a cost challenge in terms of a carbon footprint to manage in terms of incentivizing—bringing in new lower carbon feedstocks versus the existing petroleum—especially now with fracking, where the cost of a barrel of oil is never projected to come above $100 a barrel again in the U.S.  And, so, those are some things we can talk about with our sector report out. 

SPEAKER: Now, thank you, Joe. You reminded me of one other point I wanted to make. I mean, you guys know that there is a lot of work going on across a number of offices. So there—but one you may not be aware of that I don't think was mentioned in the past is—it was referred to as a circularity futures study. DOE has done a number of studies over the years. One is a renewable energy future study ref that was done about 10 years ago. Sam Baldwin, the chief scientist for [inaudible] led that. It was one of the more impactful studies that came out of it. We really looked at how far we could go in terms of renewable energy. So, renewable electricity futures, and then a follow-up electricity future study. We're doing a circularity future study to look at just some of the points that you raised, Joe, not just in the chemicals, but across the range of products and materials at their end of life. 

So, pulp and paper, I'll just kind of maybe hit a couple quick things here. Recommendations from folks— we did have groups from not only stakeholders, not only from industry and academia, but other agencies that showed up and things was mentioned by more than one person, stakeholder things like getting collaboration across different government agencies and some of these areas, and maybe not quite obvious, but it's good to hear that and also hear there's an appetite to do that—developing things like standard frameworks to define, measure, and quantify net zero. 

You will notice that we have actually settled on the terminology near zero for each industrial subsector. Drive is low carb, low carbon and as near to 0 as possible, with the intent of a low—of a sorry, of a net zero economy going forward. And we think that reflects more accurately the technological potential within terms of each industrial sector to drive those technological solutions, to reduce the direct emissions as much as possible from the facilities and through the supply chains. 

So, some metrics that were the idea of really looking at things like water and land use to really think more holistically about sustainability—we want to capture things like this. Air and water quality impacts from local plant operations, investment impact to apply across the sector—so that ratio of how much you invest—and to impact, I think, is particularly important. It's important for us. 

I know there's some questions that folks on this committee have raised about looking more closely at our impacts related to investments, and I think that there's a lot more that needs to—can be—done there to get that information out to the community, and health and safety mean we want to be considering things that are very practical with any technologies. You can think about that across all these sectors. Hydrogen of course, comes up all the time. 

And, so, things like metrics, number of safety incidents, increasing employment, percentage of waste directed to landfills—we can look to the EU for some of those types of targets, and percent reduction and things like packaging forever chemicals and waste streams. Next slide. 

SPEAKER: I think maybe one we're coming up on one at 25. 

SPEAKER: That's right. I was going to call it here and say there's an RFI overview. This is what we put out there with respect to the RFI, these categories—the barriers, challenges, and cross-cutting strategies, the framework to pathways impacts and evaluation criteria and net zero, given some of what we received near 0, like I mentioned earlier. So, we asked. And the RFI was very long, very, very long and had sections for cement, chemicals, food, and beverage. We are not aware of—[inaudible] it was very long. 

So, there are slides that cover representative feedback that we received, I think, in the interest of time we hit on, I think, important concepts I wanted. I took my time earlier. Whether we received that from the workshop or the RFI, you'll see some more examples here. I think they simply kind of really amplify. This is not a complete summary. These are representative types of input that we received on all these areas. So, I'll wrap up with that. 

And we will share these slides with the committee as well as post them online for the public. So, there'll be an opportunity to look at some of those specific examples. But we do have, say, 5 or 10 minutes, if anybody wants to ask questions or if you have specific—one of the areas in the RFI that Joe has a slide on is data centers, if people want to ask about that. So, we'll open the floor. 

SPEAKER: OK. My question is on your models. How would they be deployed to industries and to validate them, you're going to need feedback from companies? Is it something that you're considering? 

SPEAKER: Yeah. I mean, I think, goes in line with Jeffrey's question earlier about being able to put those out there. The models that we have developed so far—I mentioned there are Excel-based spreadsheet models. So, they allow a certain amount of flexibility to look at sensitivities in a way that was originally developed for us to try to estimate reduction emissions reduction potential in the U.S. And with that, there's a number of simplifying assumptions or a certain just framing that we have to be able to implement to capture the purpose of what these models are to forecast or estimate the emissions reductions potential. 

The—by putting out those spreadsheet models that are designed in a way that it can—that knobs can be dialed by users for their own purposes—I think they will. I think the industry can find utility. Think, for example, universities and others that are wanting to do similar modeling to what we've done—could change those assumptions. These models can also be adapted by users to be perhaps—in their form, to be more specific … Let's just assume for a moment that we have a certain assumptions around carbon capture and storage, because if about maybe the 90 or so cement facilities in the United States—but let's say a user is a particular cement facility that has no access to geologic sequestration or no real ability to do that, they could still run that model and dial that in as 0 and dial in their technological kind of approaches into this model. 

But additionally, they will be able to bring in new technologies with certain assumptions that could also affect those curves. But these are not designed. These are not designed for things like engineering design. They're not designed to get to a level of specificity that can be done at that level for investment decisions, for example. These can be done—I think these types of models can be used in a way that provides insight and directionality and guidance, but they certainly have their limitations. But principally and first and foremost, they were designed for us too. 

[no audio] with that due to the emissions footprint through the supply chain for glass—and was trying to bring in a few of those case study examples into this report, but mostly point people to other resources. And apologies to everyone online. We had a Wi-Fi blip here, so the Zoom disconnected. But think we're back on now. So, Betsy has a question. 

ELIZABETH DETROW: Thank you for the presentation. Very practical. You had farming up there—the large, dark blue sector. 

[no audio] 

SPEAKER: It would take quite a lot typically as efficient electrification. It has to be done efficiently, and you have to really think of it through that lens. I think that's a really important point. And it's not just, I think, on the energy efficiency part, but material efficiency. And we are pointing to some work that our team has done principally out of Oak Ridge National Lab on food loss and waste through the entire food supply chain from farms to commercial and residential. Those are other important areas. If you reduce food loss and waste along those supply chains, that's a huge factor. And that's not just in energy loss of material, material efficiency that has [inaudible] to energy. 

OK. I've spoken too long. 

JAMES HAUG: Yeah. I think the Wi-Fi is telling us that it's time for lunch. So, I think perhaps we should take a break here. We will resume at 1:00 with our first report out from the report outlining subcommittee. Thank you. 

[break for lunch]

SPEAKER: A report out from the subcommittee on report outline. So, I will hand it over to Sharon. 

SHARON NOLEN: Right. So, I appreciate those of you who've been on the report outline committee. We might just have a raise of hands so everybody can see who that has been. OK. I particularly thank Jeff. He led a meeting in my absence. [applause] [inaudible] Very good. 

So, what we're going to try to do today is just at a very high level, go through the different sections. So, I know some of the subcommittees are going to be talking about their section in more detail. Maybe everyone's talking about it in more detail. But if we can just go through very high level at this point and see what comments there are. So, basically what we're looking for, any overlaps. 

We don't want to [inaudible] anything. If there are gaps, we want to identify those as [inaudible]. And then finally, at the end of today, we would like to have agreement. This is our outline going forward. And that's not to say it cannot be changed, but this should be the 90% or something that would be questions or comments on what we're trying to do. All right. 

So, we're starting with an executive summary and an introduction. So, we want to talk about the purpose of the committee, why we want to focus on industrial emissions, and then evolving emerging trends. And then we moved into the technology and opportunities group, which Eric had been leading and now Neal has taken. Thank you, Neal. And we'll let you just talk. It's a very long section, but if you can go through just a high level. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Yeah. And apologies—and we'll get to a presentation on this later after the presentation—so we can get into more detail. So, this was, I guess you'd say, one of our key crosscut efforts to try to consolidate a lot of the stuff that really is cross-cutting across all of these. And this has been the roadmap for our subcommittee on crosscut technology as well. And these represent what we see as the fundamental topics—energy efficiency, material efficiency, circular economy, electrification, dynamic load management, and I'll go into that a little more detail when we get to the breakout of the topic there—use of low greenhouse gas hydrogen by industrial firms—and this is really focusing on the process use, not the power use of hydrogen—is circular [inaudible] and what we were hearing about this morning. 

Direct use of heat from renewable sources and bioenergy—this would be solar, and geothermal, and then self-generation. This would be generation on site by the industrial firm. Carbon capture utilization and storage—and then the infrastructure needs—and I would note that the infrastructure here is really about the infrastructure external to the firm. So, this would be electricity provided by the grid, hydrogen delivery of hydrogen produced external to the facility. And then the last would be the use of what I guess we'll call the—there it is. And then the carbon capture. And then infrastructure.

Hydrogen—sorry, I missed something there. Then also the CO2 that is going to sequestration. So, that would be the pipelines that either go to geologic sequestration or saline out aquifers, and then finally looking at non-CO2, GHGs, so this would be [inaudible], methane, and the various gases—burning gases—and looking at those as a process emission or a by-product in the case of some of the gases from some of the corona effects. 

So, that's what we're talking about in terms of cross-cutting. Those are the ones we've identified as the cross-cutting focus. And guess—did I mention water in there? That was moved to barriers. That's right. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. 

SHARON NOLEN: Any comments, questions? And I do want to remind everybody, we have the Miro board. So, this is a really good chance, I think, as we're going through these discussion, to document comments for the subcommittee—because maybe go back and look at these later. So, just want to remind everybody that is out there. Any comment from [inaudible] or the [inaudible]? Sweden is going to cover the industrial sectors subsectors. 

SPEAKER: I just thought that. 

SPEAKER: So, I guess there will be a presentation about that in the subsequent committee. So, what we have been working on in that subsector and hope to provide information ... Here is a brief review of each of the subsectors in terms of fuels and some of the sectors in those subsectors and then some gaps as well. So, what we have been looking at is—some critical look at the list of both in terms of what technologies we identify as deployable and what we find is—maybe some open questions on that—identify some of those questions. It's distributed among the groups—will present all of that. 

We have especially in terms of point, we have identified a couple of sectors that—we think they may not be enough coverage in the reports and the information we've given so far. One of those data centers, the other one is mining, third is forestry. And we don't mean biomass—more kind of management of forest land and then agriculture. So, we're not saying that those needs to be considered, but we wanted to point out that those are areas for carbon fuels to control and should be noted—right. 

And the kind view—it's similar to a couple of years ago when we went into the water business … It was argued that this isn't really DOE, but then DOE is the one that has the national labs and research funds to impact. So, there may still be able to engage with those other areas—kind of something that we discussed. 

And I think we have covered most of the other things. We've split it up—aluminum, glass, nonferrous metals, other things that are covered within reports that should be what we'll be talking about here. So, we hope to provide input on all of these things. 

We also briefly—and this might go more on the education subcommittee—but we did talk about workforce gaps for each of these sectors. As an example, some days in my area, because iron and steel—lot of the growth in steel is in the South and Texas, but most of funding seems to be going Northeast as well as most of the educational activities around schools in the Northeast. So, there's a gap. A lot of those people are not going to move to the South and Texas. So, education-wise, there might be a need to look at—think about—those areas, even though [inaudible] seems to be lot of them on the Northeast, not that booming steel industry, which would consider being to the South and Texas. 

SHARON NOLEN: It's certainly fair game to tee up things for the subsequent committee report. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, let's see. Yeah, I think that's—did I miss anything? No no. You're going to present it anyway. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, you caught the essence of it. 

SHARON NOLEN: Yeah. We're just calling on people who are within the report committee. So that one. And the next one we have is barriers. And I think Neal's going to kick that off and then Kathy for help. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Sure. So, Kathy has been our noble leader, keeping us focused, and what we've—and in some ways the barriers are the cross-cutting barriers. So there, we basically kind of divided some of the stuff—that some of it went into cross-cutting, and if it was a barrier-related issue, that was not specific. So, electricity issues was a key. Pilot demonstrations to deployment, that commercialization work that Joe has done a lot of efforts on—technology gaps where R&D can help, how to address industries that burn their own by-product as a fuel. 

So, this would be a waste fuel or a waste product that could be, for example, a biomass that would deteriorate into methane emissions if it were landfilled. So, utilization of that because those waste products have negative value, the whole question of water adequacy, the question to you—is the water there—the ability to source the water—are there water constraints because of Indigenous issues either in an aquifer or surface conditions? 

Then some of the infrastructure siting, permitting, and policy support ... So, again, how to build assets, transmission, water pipelines, things like that. Financing and market demand barriers—and this is looking at a need to coordinate with the economic competitiveness section, and that's going to look at, how do you—is there an issue on access to capital, financing, or other issues? 

And then the market pull stuff that we were hearing some this morning about—and then finishing out with policy drivers and our private sector demand for long-term offtake agreements such as for clean steel, concrete, et cetera, workforce issues—and that's one we've been talking about this some this morning. And then finally, at the very end, the data access, quality, and modeling, which is a topic that we discussed at our last roundtable. 

So, Cathy, did I do OK? 

CATHY CHOI: Yeah. Excellent work, Neal. And just as a preface, what Neal went through is what the subcommittee is addressing. There's a little bit of rearrangement. So, for example, those industries that burn their own by-products, we pull that into a new category called access to low carbon fuels and feedstock. So, things like there's a little bit of rearrangement. 

SHARON NOLEN: Will you be showing that in your— 

CATHY CHOI: I'll be showing that tomorrow. Yeah. And one question I do have is, do you have any concerns of overlap or redundancy when it comes to workforce needs, because that was brought up literally 2 or 3 minutes ago with the Industrial sector too. So, that's, I think, maybe a watch out there. 

SHARON NOLEN: Anna couldn't join us today. But, Abigail, I know you're going to be talking about that. Any other comments for them? And then we'll move into economic competitiveness. Jeff agreed to cover that. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Sure. So, this isn't my subcommittee, but I'll be talking you through the outline of this section. So, it's just a few specific points that could help ensure manufacturing in the U.S. is economically competitive. One point is about the need for some sort of carbon border adjustment or GHG-adjusted border fee to protect domestic industry from competition from dirtier firms abroad. We have—and we'll need data to back it up. We'll need something to cover the operating cost gap, which is primarily energy costs. 

Example policies could be tax credits or subsidy or something, or access to more favorable electricity rates, various ideas, access to upfront financing in order to upgrade facilities and equipment, ensuring a market for the long-term offtake of clean goods—that's something we've chatted about earlier today. Industrial technology exports, so if we want to—so this is both about U.S. technological leadership and licensing U.S. technology for use elsewhere and getting the licensing fees as well as decarbonizing industry globally, which is needed to address climate change. 

Then alignment of standards, U.S. and international standards, to facilitate technology interoperability and policy compatibility—compatibility. And lastly, supply chain resilience—so, making sure the supply chain can't be disrupted, shipping disruptions, natural disasters, et cetera. 

SPEAKER: Any comments on this one? 

SPEAKER: Sorry, excuse me. Something that I'll flag on this section that we can maybe talk about tomorrow during the time for this subcommittee—but some of the items on the outline here do kind of edge into areas that I'm not sure the committee can make recommendations on. So, I will remind folks that policy recommendations per se are not within scope of the committee, but to think about what actions we can take that might further some of these goals. I think that's within scope. 

SHARON NOLEN: Next, we have workforce and social considerations. Abigail is going to cover that. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: And then we'll cover this in more detail tomorrow. But I think this was kind of iterative from the subcommittee and then with additions from the report outline subcommittee. But workforce training, including all of the things listed here—specifically, how DOE can be involved and looking at existing facilities, community colleges, training providers—are up to date. So, I think looking at existing— and then what else is needed beyond the existing training programs and opportunities there—workforce availability and demographics. 

Just as we've heard, there's going to be a lack of available workforce for a lot of this, and how do we help solve that problem. And I think this also alludes to some of the things that Sridhar mentioned—of just kind of geographic regional mismatch as well with current workforce and where the investments are going. Specifically, then honing in on STEM and STEM-related skills as that becomes more and more important in the technologies that are going to be used in industry. 

Then thinking also about how to manage job disruptions, any negative impacts of technology deployment. So, thinking about the current workforce of the industries that we're talking about and how to ensure that the current workforce is either able to upskill and continue to work in those industries or otherwise manage those kinds of jobs disruptions. Then, and this, I'm realizing maybe we can discuss—like we'll rearrange because I think we have this next bullet that's more about the community and stakeholder engagement, which is also encompassed by this chapter. 

But then we have some other workforce-related bullet points beneath that. So, maybe we'll rearrange some of that for a better flow. But, certainly, all of the discussions that we had this morning related to community benefit plans and community engagement, we want to be able to cover in this chapter.  And, so, I think we're, as a subcommittee, people [inaudible] being able to hear more about those [inaudible] across the DOE offices. 

Then, coming out of the report outlines—the committee—we really expanded on this national labs bullet point and how to really leverage the national labs and some of their existing programs to really help with the workforce issue. So, a lot of great examples were listed here to cover that. And then the last two bullets looking at Occupational Safety and Health considerations. And then, of course, kind of back to the community and CEP, making sure that we're also covering reducing pollutant impacts on frontline communities in addition to the [inaudible] impacts and other community benefits to cover that as well— again, probably some rearrangement of this will make a bit more sense. 

But, yeah, I think [inaudible] will go through things in more detail tomorrow. And then—guess just a note on what's been mentioned on the potential overlap of workforce needs coming across in other chapters. What we had kind of discussed in the report outlined subcommittees is that that's OK, and that we kind of expect that it makes sense that there's going to be specific workforce needs and workforce points that want to be made in other chapters. 

I'm thinking specifically—like for some of the subsectors, if there's a very specific, steel-related need, that makes sense to go with the steel chapters and for any of the other subsectors or the cross-cutting, I think, pieces as well. So, I think our understanding is where your subcommittee thinks it makes sense to have a workforce callout as part of your chapter, that should be OK. I don't think it needs to be one or the other, but that this chapter will be where you can have a higher-level overview of the broad kind of needs across industries, across subsectors for the workforce—so bigger questions on just like, how do we get enough people to be working in manufacturing. 

What are the broadly the types of training programs and things like that. And then, of course, the community piece will be in this chapter. But I guess if there are any specific community or specific pollutant-related things that may make sense in another chapter, I'd say I think that would make sense as well to live in both places. But we're happy to take feedback on any of that as well. 

SHARON NOLEN: [inaudible] for that group. 

SPEAKER: So, I would just mention, I think that's a good distinction that you're making there. So, for just as a very specific example, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mexico, they are basically doing workforce programs—start at middle school, high school, and then go up through the career. 

And again, their idea is it doesn't really matter whether they go to a chip fab, battery plant, or an automobile assembly or a steel mill, you're creating a supply chain of workforce, and that should be transferable. And when we look at those three states I mentioned, the programs are very, very similar, and building off each other, even though the demographics and industry is very different versus training for a very specialized application. 

SHARON NOLEN: You just add—Harris and I—we're just talking about the industrial training and assessment centers and that seems like that ought to be mentioned, as well, because that's a very good training program. 

THOMAS HAYNES: Yeah. Yeah. So, we can make a point to include the iTags. and so—yeah. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: So, I guess the question on that would be, how do you manage that with Section 8, which is the Current Work Assessment Gaps Analysis of the TA because that is— 

SHARON NOLEN: That's true. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: —that is one of those programs that is both the TA program and a workforce training program offers that duality. So, you need to probably deal with the two attributes and need deal with them together or separately. 

SHARON NOLEN: That is true. Yeah, good point, Neal. All right. So that's something we can think more about where that belongs, but I think in meantime we can just—OK. Jeff's gonna cover the last section. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Sure. So, this is for DOE's Current Work Assessment and Gaps Analysis. This is the subcommittee I'm co-chairing along with Sasha. And, of course, there's a lot of potential for overlap between this chapter and earlier ones, since DOE works on the things that are discussed in earlier chapters. So, the way we conceived of limiting overlap was that this chapter focuses very much on a DOE context. 

So, an earlier technology chapter might talk about which technologies are important and how they perform and why, whereas this chapter might talk about DOE's work in that space and what gaps need to be filled. So, like with Zack's earlier comment about DOE context on workforce, we should keep that in mind but also try to avoid overlap between earlier chapters and this one so that we have something new to say for this section. 

So, there are two broad parts, part A and B. A is the smaller. It's just starting with a factual overview of what are DOE's existing activities and programs pertaining to this transition to clean industry. I've already done some research on this—have some detailed tables built out that I shared with the committee, you may remember. Those should probably go in an Appendix or something because they're too detailed to be part of the main text, but we'll have a little write-up about them. 

And then the part B is the set of useful and actionable recommendations for DOE. So that part B is really the heart of the section. One is to provide better data and computer modeling to assess what progress we've made and what the needs still are. Examples might be improving the frequency and coverage of the manufacturing energy consumption survey or industrial sector coverage and annual energy outlook, et cetera—how to optimize existing DOE programs and technology choices, such as what should each DOE office prioritize. 

Three would be ways that DOE can seize opportunities or overcome barriers, the ones listed in those earlier chapters. Four would be how DOE can serve as a coordinator, whether across federal agencies, national labs, academia, and private industry. Five is how DOE could use other helpful policy tools—the way in which it administers tax credits, establishing energy efficiency standards like test standards and minimum energy performance standards for industrial equipment, or demand-side support measures of the sort heard a little bit about earlier. 

Six is about how DOE could advise other agencies. For instance, DOE could submit recommendations to FERC on industrial electricity rates. And seven, how DOE could best understand the industrial needs and challenges, the needs of industrial firms, and partner with them. 

SHARON NOLEN: Any comments on that one? Neal? 

NEAL ELLIOTT: The other example agency I would suggest under number six there, Jeff, would be to also add in the Department of Commerce with the CHIPS and Sciences Program, which—my sense is—and Joe, let me know what you think on this—is that level of coordination between CHIPS and Sciences administration and EERE at least is not particularly robust at this point. Is that a fair assessment? 

JOE POWELL: That's probably a fair assessment for me. Some discussions happening also between AMMTO and the CHIPS folks, but I'm not aware. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: But the CHIPS and Science—the major issues that are emerging from Commerce right now are workforce infrastructure availability, particularly electricity and water and then disposition of issues associated with non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Those are the three sort of big hurdles, and those overlap a lot with a lot of the stuff we're talking about here on the EDA. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Great point. And yes, FERC here was just listed as an example. It could be DOE advising or partnering with various other agencies. 

SHARON NOLEN: All right. And then our plan was to end the report with recommendations.  And, so, we wanted that to all be in one consolidated place. We also need to prioritize recommendations. And Zach had also talked to me about thinking about the number, because I guess—and Zach, could you remind me? You have to follow up on those in some certain frequency? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yeah. So as part of Federal Advisory Committee reporting, we actually annually have to report the number of recommendations that the committee makes and whether the Department has implemented those recommendations. So, to the extent that you make it easy for us to know what you recommended is very helpful for us. And this is something that we have some examples of other advisory committee reports that might be helpful—but having clear, numbered recommendations, whether it's in a separate section or throughout the report or a section that recaptures everything from earlier in the report, I think will be very helpful. 

SHARON NOLEN: Great. And then we'll just have a summary and conclusions at the end. So hopefully, that's given you a good overview of what the report would look like. It seems like the major thing we heard, there were a couple of things we want to add and then a couple of subcommittees they want to rearrange, but I think at the end of tomorrow would be appropriate to ask for committee agreement for the outline to go forward. So, we'll plan to do that and hear about any other specific changes between now and then. 

The other thing we wanted to talk about are a couple of questions related to what the report is going to look like. So, one question I've been asking about is level of detail, because this could be a 300-page report, or it could be something much smaller. So, we need to think about that. So, do we have some bullet ideas on that or? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, there's that. There's a question about the overall length and general formatting of recommendations and other things. There's some examples here. Celina did some digging in other advisory committees. I'm sure there are some that exist, but from what we have found so far, we have not seen a report longer than 65 pages—is what I think this one is. So, we're not asking you to produce a 100- or 200-page report. The majority of reports that are produced are even much shorter than this. 

So, I think what the committee has been asked to do is quite broad, right? But there is definitely the opportunity to focus in on just specific recommendations—specific findings that you want to highlight without having to redo a lot of work that's already been done in existing DOE reports that you could just cite and say that this is good work, and we broadly agree with it. 

SHARON NOLEN: Now we have a pretty long outline, so it seems like we need to think about how long the whole report is going to be. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: So, I would note, since I'm familiar with both of these reports, they have very different purposes. The AI and data center one is targeted very much in response to a White House request to the advisory committee. So, very narrowly focused and the workforce, I think, is actually more of analogous to what we're talking about here. So maybe perhaps 65 is the—but we're already at eight. 

[laughter] 

[inaudible] 

SHARON NOLEN: We can change the font. 

THOMAS HAYNES: I'm sorry. I was saying—looking out for our subcommittee—that second report would be great to have, is what I was saying. 

SHARON NOLEN: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's available online, probably. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Yeah, they're both available online. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: And, so, I don't know how our screen share is going. [laughs] We can pull up the workforce one and—do you, Celina, want to kind of talk through what the structure of it? 

CELINA HARRIS: I guess, yeah. If David wants to make a comment. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Oh, sorry. Yeah, if David wants to say anything about effective structure and effective recommendations, he has a lot of experience with that, so. 

SPEAKER: Hi, everyone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, really, each board is individual in how they submit their recommendations, so I don't really have any advice specifically for ITIAC. This is how the SEAB does their recommendations, but there's no set way to do it. I know this Secretary prefers the shorter the recommendation, the better. That's what she said to us. 

So, she likes them short. That doesn't mean SEAB will listen to that. Sometimes SEAB does, as this one is, a fairly long recommendation, but she doesn't like the report format for recommendations. She'd want them to just highlight their main points right up front. But really, the structure is up to you. Whatever you think most effectively transmits the recommendation that you're hoping to get adopted by the department. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: I guess I thought it kind of went without saying we'd have some sort of executive summary or the like at the front with just bulleted recommendations for someone as busy as the Secretary. And then the report in the back is for people with more time. 

SHARON NOLEN: Yeah. And we do have an executive line. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Right. Right. Yeah. 

SHARON NOLEN: Sorry, Neal. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Abigail was before me. OK. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Sorry. Can we turn up the name tents? And also a reminder that I forgot to give earlier, please say your name when you start giving your comment to help the transcription later. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Neal Elliott. So my question is, with David's admonition that the goal of the Secretary is to focus on the recommendations, perhaps one option would be to basically do Executive Summary, Introduction, and then put in a Summary Recommendation Section and then a Recommendation Section and a Conclusion Section an and then provide an Appendix, which would include the different subcommittee reports as a Appendix to the main report. 

I'm also sensitive, not just to the Secretary, but also to congressional audience who basically requested this committee be formed—and that might be a strategy to keep the length down. And then, I think we could probably keep it under 25 pages. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Generally agree with Neal that I think anything—like the most important pieces that we want the Secretary, people in Congress to read should definitely be up top. Or I guess if we take more of a—this is the report that's this many pages and then everything else is Appendix. Another option. One thing I wanted to clarify is the timing of the report we're planning for September of 2025. 

So, just to clarify, that regardless of how things go in the next couple of weeks, we may or may not have a different Secretary that this report is going to, correct? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: That's true. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: So, the report format may change. 

[laughter] 

SHARON NOLEN: I'm not sure who had your hand up next. Joe, you can go ahead and go. 

JOE POWELL: Maybe an observation and a bit of a consideration of—just as you guys talk through this— I had in my mind—I was thinking about the data question and data methodologies and kind of observed that the need for improved data—whether the next data—the frequency that was mentioned—how industrial greenhouse gas emissions break down by industrial subsector right up in the intro. 

And as you look through that, even more targeted the questions about embedded or embodied carbon shows up in a number of places. For example, the data access, quality, and modeling included standard metrics in Section 5 as a barrier. It's also an economic competitiveness with respect to CBAM. And maybe it's a bit of a question to the group. 

Now that you have this long sort of extensive list—kind of gone through that to really pick out some of the root issues and that might be another way to synthesize to see where those connections are. Because if it's addressed, the more root level or more fundamental level, and it has impacts—this is an extremely extensive, comprehensive list of areas that are important. 

And it's not surprising because the industrial sector is massive, but for the purposes of where the root cause is or what the kind of focus. Anyways, comment and question—has anybody sort of tried to do that to some extent—the synthesizing? 

CELINA HARRIS: Maybe. 

[laughter] 

JOE POWELL: That was one example. The may be others. 

CELINA HARRIS: Well, I don't know that I have an answer to that question, but my comment is parallel to your comment, I think, Joe, in that—like we talked about this in the very first meeting that we had all in person—which is that we want to produce something that is distinct from what has already been kind of produced and is already happening within the agency—and is value added in the way that we are empowered to be. And, so, I think you're getting at one cut. 

And then the thing that I was going to say is that, with respect to recommendations, I think we're going to have to have a process of really prioritizing. This touches on what you said, Zach, as well, which is that we don't want to just produce a—like, comprehensiveness to me is not the top priority. It's actually like, what are the most strategic recommendations that we can make where our voice will be distinct and unique from other centers of gravity that might be making recommendations? And you know that expression, like “kill your darlings” or something? Like, we're going to have to really, I think, prioritize. 

And I would just keep pushing ourselves to do that. I think it's a pretty good outcome if what we produce is short and has, like, here are the top three things or the top five things. And if it's—think on there for a value add to sort the conventional wisdom of other reports. 

SHARON NOLEN: Next. 

THOMAS HAYNES: Yeah. Thomas Haynes. This kind of goes here to your question too, just about the format, for lack of a better way of saying, not being too detailed, not being too vague or coarse with it. And what I found myself thinking is that I also wonder about from chapter to chapter, the uniformity or the lack thereof, right? There are just certain chapters—by the way this is broken out right now, that they beckon being quite detailed, at least as outlined now. And then there are certain chapters—like I think it might have been Economic Competitiveness—where, Zach, you were just giving us the heads up warning that we can only go maybe so far in some of those types of recommendations. 

So, whatever we do, how uniform do we or do we not need to be from chapter to chapter, especially as far as level of detail is concerned? Because the way the chapters are outlined right now, if it was not constrained by trying to kind of police it, so to speak, certain chapters would just be much more detailed than others. But is that too imbalanced the way it's going to look in the end? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: And I think one thing—we don't really have to pull it up now—but the AI report is a good example of a more focused report. And I think once the committee perhaps gets its initial report out of the way, so to speak, you could focus in on more narrow topics and have the subcommittee focused on a single topic, produce five pages of recommendations on that topic, and move on from that in a 6-month period or something. So, there could be a transition from this kind of big scope to smaller scope activities and that could factor into what you weigh more heavily and less heavily in the initial report. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: I mean, one of the—go ahead, Sunday. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: Oh, OK. I just want to agree with the three speakers, Mr. Cresko here, Sasha, and Comas, that we have to synthesize. I think the best way is to avoid a lot of text because the most important things can be lost within the text. We're talking about technologies that are valuable in the industry, and we're talking about it as a whole. 

But what I think is that if we take a given process, break it down into different steps in a tabular format and then present what are the challenges and what are the barriers, and then from there, make recommendations for each process step, it is easy for anyone to read. But if you have a bunch of text, it is hard for people to go through the details. 

SUBODH DAS: Yeah, my thinking would be—let's agree on a one-page-exactly summary. And all of us should opine and input that one page has what's the goal of getting this done for the projects and with the five or six recommendations. If we cannot describe everything we have done in one page, two things, nobody will read it—not nobody—most people would not read it, and second, our thoughts and are not very concise. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: So, I think before we agree on 60-page report, let's agree on a one-page-exactly summary—the Secretary or Congress somebody will read it. But if we agree on one page, then everything just follows. And I think it's OK, like to you point—OK, to have different chapters, different formats, because what's written in this chemical format could be different in aluminum because different people are writing. And there is no need to make sure it's a one book with same authorship. I think that would be a waste of time. 

SHARON NOLEN: I guess my thought on that is, I mean, that could also be something we can get the contractor to help us with. I mean, I've worked on peer review committees before where the contractor does a lot of editing and so that might be something that we could do, as well. So, I agree that's probably not the best use of our time, but that might be the [inaudible] All right, Neal. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: So, a cautionary note on using the contractor to edit. 

[laughter] 

I just went through a peer review in which we ended up, as the committee, having to go back and rewrite certain sections when two meanings ended up getting distorted out. So just a little caution on too much delegation. The other thing, and I'm going to push back a little bit on this desire here and the contrast in what David was talking about earlier—I'm going to argue, as some of the devil's argument here, in contrast to Joe's comment. 

This is a fundamentally different report to the Secretary because DOE has never had a robust industrial program prior to the last 4 years. That's been a dramatic scale up of activity that's occurred here. And I think helping to guide the Secretary into what are the areas that need expansion, what are the areas that need to be de-emphasized in the overall portfolio, is probably at this point a particularly germane contribution. 

So, I certainly agree with Abigail in having been on the receiving end of these reports. I prefer the one on data centers that we saw there, which I read almost within hours of it coming out. But I think we need to be thinking about what is the purpose of what do we want to achieve with these recommendations? And maybe we're getting sort of tied up in the details without what are we trying to communicate to the Secretary and to Congress in terms of this writ large, not a focused response to a topic. Jeff. We've got Jeff and that's— 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Well, I think it is worth figuring out what we want to do about general report length. How to power a data centers is a much narrower question than how to transition the U.S. to clean industry across all industries while addressing workforce and economic and everything. We have a much bigger topic. That could almost be one small point on ours. If every point in ours was 12 pages, we'd end up with 1,000 pages. 

I think we should maybe even consider—so we probably don't want to end up with wildly different levels of detail from chapter to chapter. It might make sense to try to preserve some flexibility, but maybe to try to assign general page ranges to different chapters. Like if this cross-cutting is meant to be a large part of the report, maybe we say that's 15 to 20 pages right there, but we don't say 15 to 80 for that chapter. 

And then we could kind of just give some broad—I know at least for my subcommittee it might feel like the link guidance is more actionable if we break it down to the subcommittee level and give some page ranges. 

If there's appendices that aren't even included in the page range, that's another matter, and that can make it easier to hit a tight page range because you just move more and more material to the Appendix. But then the question is, if the main paper is citing the Appendix all the time, is this paper really that short, or is it just a way of sneaking extra length in? 

I guess my sense is, it's OK if this ends up being one of the longest advisory committee reports because we have one of the biggest topics that any advisory committee has ever been asked to look at. And maybe if we can pick something that's not overly restrictive and map it down to subcommittee level with approximate ranges, that could help. 

SHARON NOLEN: We're going to have to move on here in a few minutes. So, Betsy, I know you've had your hand up for a while, so let's take— 

ELIZABETH DETROW: It's short. Betsy Detrow. It should be short. We've got a lot of things in here. I would suggest you go back to our charter and look at what we're supposed to be saying and compare each one of these things to that charter and decide if it fits or not. I think a lot of us have a lot of interests and a lot of—I don't want to use the word pet—but things that really bother us. And we should do that. 

SHARON NOLEN: OK. All right. So, if you have other thoughts, please hang on to those. What we're going to try to do here is do the report-out on the Subcommittee on Industrial Sectors. If we could try to hold that—do you think you can hold that to 30 minutes? And then we'll be back on track for the next— 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Office of— 

SHARON NOLEN: Yes. Thank you. Discussion at 2:30, so. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: And maybe before we dive into this one, I'll just mention—on the Mural Board, this is there, you can also express interest in person, send an email. Now that the committee is up to 18 members, any subcommittee can have up to nine members on it. No subcommittee has that many people right now, and there have also been people who have dropped off or moved around subcommittees. 

So, keep in mind, if you want to do more work than you're doing now, that there is the opportunity to participate in more subcommittees as we go through these, so. 

SHARON NOLEN: OK. 

SUBODH DAS: All right. Our charter is Industrial Sector Subcommittee Report. And we have met once in person so far and once on Zoom on last Sunday. So, our group consists of myself as a lead, Sridhar; Sunday; [inaudible] Dutrow; Joe Powell, who's offline by Zoom; and Jolene. And what I'm going to cover is the following sectors. 

Iron and steel is in green because there's a roadmap and it's fairly well settled. Aluminum, there's the roadmap not by DOE.

The industry has a roadmap, but it's still fairly well studied. Cement, same category. Chemicals, also same category. We need more work on paper and pulp and data centers. And there are a few other recommendations for us to consider, which will be on my last slide. So, the first section is iron and steel. So, Sunday, would you like to take a lead on that? 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: OK, I will just talk about this briefly. In the iron and steel industry, there are five pathways to decarbonization. The first one is the BF-BOF out of steelmaking with carbon capture utilization and storage. The BF-BOF is the traditional route of steelmaking and it's more carbon intensive. 

But the existing companies cannot be retrofitted with carbon capture—I think Joe mentioned this earlier— because of the logistics involved in it. And in addition, again, the storage, the CCUS, is not available in all locations. So, those are the challenges with the first one. 

The second one is DRI-EAF route. EAF is the modern route of steelmaking. In the USA, we don't have the DRI grade iron ore. That is one problem. And then the other problem is that even if we have the DRI, it has to be melted in the electrical furnace. You need renewable energy, electricity, and you need biofuel to completely go CO2 neutral. 

So, those are the challenges we face with that option. And then the third option is green hydrogen DRI-EAF. Production of hydrogen, it's very expensive. And again, availability is not there currently. And secondly, a DRI that is produced via hydrogen will melt differently from the traditional DRI in the electric furnace. 

So, we face the same issue with—How do we better utilize the DRI in the electrical furnace? And then the fourth route is the smelting reduction. It's a modern way of producing iron. 

This route is low CO2 intensive, but the high concentration of CO2 stream during production may make it suitable for carbon capture. But again, this route is not being produced at the scale that we need today in the steel industry. So, we can produce them at a smaller scale. And then the last one is electrolysis, which is the molten oxide electrolysis or electrowinning. 

The challenges there is that these facilities are in pilot scale. They face significant challenges with scaling up to produce iron and steel to the level that the traditional steelmaking facilities are producing today. Let's assume that all of these options actually can produce up to scale, but let's compare the cost of these alternative routes of iron and steelmaking to the traditional route. 

You can see the first batch on the left is showing the cost of DRI-EAF hydrogen production. It's more than double the cost of commercial production of iron and steel in the DRI-EAF or the electric furnace. 

Then you talk about the carbon capture DRI-EAF is also somewhat more expensive. The same thing with smelting reduction process. Then, in terms of timing—availability of this technology in the future—if you compare it to the commercial way of making iron and steel, the smelting reduction route will only be available in 2028. That is the most aggressive timeline for that. 

And then, if you look at the green hydrogen DRI-EAF, we are looking at 2035 before we can even talk about commercialization there. So, the cost and the availability of this technology for implementation in the industry are the challenges that we face in the industry today. So, if we move on to the next slide? 

And then, so then there are process heating and preheating technologies that we have to consider, which also are not available today. We have to replace the fossil natural gas with hydrogen and biofuel for reheating, to reheat furnaces, and for preheating metallurgical vessels. We talked earlier about electrification and induction heating technologies for heat furnaces as well, or microwave plasma heating technology. 

So, this table here is listing different process steps where combinations of these renewable energies can be employed for heating and preheating. But we are really very far away from implementing or adopting these technologies that I talked about. That's all I have. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Our next slide is—are you going to cover next slide? OK, I can cover the next two. So, we also looked at energy efficiency issues related to existing steel plants. And there is some opportunities there. I won't list all of these, but some of the major ones are there's a lot of heat recovery opportunities, especially that are not—they're small in scale, and they may not justify an entire power plant, like in an integrated steel mill. But if you take all the mini mills, there's a lot of high-temperature heat that's being not utilized. 

There is, of course, the scrap utilization problem. That scrap is getting more and more concentrated in copper. And if you can come up with ways of separating that copper, it would upgrade the scrap. That's another major one, I think. 

The third one that I would mention here that's significant, I think, is people may not realize, but the slag that we throw away or that we generate in electric arc furnaces, or even BOS furnaces, actually has about 40% to 50% iron units. So, [inaudible] that is not utilized. So, all that ferrous units partially reduced, and, if we can use that, then that would offset the need for reducing ore as well, if there's a cost-effective way of doing that. There's also mill scale that's being produced. So, these are just energy efficiency or material efficiency targets. 

We critically looked at the DOE Liftoff Report, and it states kind of boldly that 40% of emissions could be abated by off-the-shelf technology. So, we took a look at it and said, are they really off-the-shelf? The two major ones—we may have missed something because it took time to skim over that thing and find the actual items. 

But two items that we found, one was transition from BOF to EAF. Yes, that's off-the-shelf, but it's a supply chain issue. We cannot really scale this up. It's not something we can buy. I mean, the industry already has as much EAF as you have capacity for. There is no more scrap to go around, and scrap is predicted to be a scarce resource in the future. 

The second thing is the DRI/BRI cannot be easily melted in the electric arc furnace, especially if you come with a lower-grade iron ore. So, it is not really a solution, more than what we already have deployed. The other thing the Liftoff report mentions is there are alternative ironmaking processes to deliver pig iron. Neither Sunday or I know those. [laughs] 
There are techniques like smelt reduction technologies [inaudible] who [inaudible] deals, but they're all fossil-based at the moment. I don't know if anything that is deployable. So, it'd be interesting to go back and ask the authors of this report, “What are those technologies?” [inaudible] is unaware of it. I think that's all I have. Thank you. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: From iron and steel, we move to aluminum. I have picked two slides. The first one is a slide that talks about impact of how to go to net-zero carbon emission. And there are technologies, inert anode, in green, and there are alumina reduction technologies. So, they both have likelihood of bringing the carbon emission to lower. 

But the bigger impact are going to come from alternative fuels: for example, using electricity—not using electricity and renewable energy or the grid decarbonization. The point we're trying to make that technology has a role, new technology, inert anode, alumina. But that's only one-third of what the industry can do in the red. Two-thirds is outside the industry—development of alternative fuels or the grid decarbonization. So, this is looking at what can industry do itself. Technology is one-third of [inaudible]. Other answers come from what other sectors are doing, which DOE is already involved. 

The second graph that I'm showing is that when it comes to aluminum industry in the U.S., it's basically recycling. We only have one alumina. We have zero bauxite mining. We only have one alumina refinery that's 50 years old. We only have four aluminum smelting, and that's 30—the youngest one is 30 years old. So, the name of the game in aluminum is recycling. 
We produce more aluminum scrap than anybody in the world. We export more aluminum scrap than anybody in the world. And unfortunately, we landfill more aluminum scrap than anybody else. So, these are two scenarios, the green and the yellow, and see what can we done to lower the carbon footprint. A significant amount can be lowered. And basically, 38 million cars will get on the road, and all the old cars are raw materials for aluminum. 

And as the aluminum-intensive cars are being introduced, the scrap that has higher aluminum value will absorb [inaudible] also will be very prominent. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Joe, we like to engage with you and see what can we do. We did a roadmap. I was a part of that like 15 years ago. So maybe this is time to revamp. And a lot of things have changed in terms of dynamics. We only making scrap and not the inert anode and all that, so a lot of new thinking has come, so it will be simpler and a more focused roadmap. 

So that's aluminum. From aluminum, we move to cement. Joe, are you there? 

JOE POWELL: Yeah, I am. Can you hear me? 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Yeah, we can hear you. Next three slides are yours. 

JOE POWELL: Great. Well, the thing to keep in mind with cement is that CO2 is one of the inevitable products that comes off of limestone and calcination.  And, so, half of the footprint is the very high endothermic process heat that has to be provided to drive that reaction. But the other half is the fact that CO2 is coming off of calcium carbonate to make lime, and that's inevitable. 

So, the European Union is considering maybe a waiver on that CO2, that limestone is a fossil CO2. It's not a fossil fuel CO2, but it is a fossil CO2 emission anyway. And, so, therefore, the thinking is it'll have to be captured or done away with in the future.  And, so, because it inevitably involves producing a fossil-derived CO2 with a lot of fuel energy, carbon capture and storage is one of the dominant pathways considered for decarbonization. And the International Energy Agency considers this to be one of the really biggest opportunities for CCS going forward. 

As Joe mentioned this morning, you can also consider recycling construction materials and crushing up concrete and using the calcium silicates and trying to cure that into a very high-strength product. But then you have issues around how does that product qualify in what is a very risk-averse industry for strength of building materials.  And, so, it's uncertain in terms of reliability how well that pathway can go forward. 

So, let's have the next slide, please. So, this is the DOE's slide on what cement decarbonization can look like. You can use hydrogen from pre-combustion capture. You make that clean hydrogen, or you can use hydrogen by electrolysis, or you can use oxy firing to create a fuel side CO2 rich stream. The CO2 coming off of the process side is concentrated, so it's relatively easy to capture. And then the final thing to do would be to just use the post-combustion CO2 capture on the fuel processes that you have today. 

So, this slide shows everything but maybe introducing the renewable electrification option for using electric furnaces in the [inaudible], which can be done. These are a little bit less capital-intensive processes than the chemical industry.  And, so, you may be able to use some demand response and intermittency in terms of bringing in renewable energy here. 

The graph on the right shows that the main energy, half of it, again, is coming—or the main CO2 footprints, half of it is in the high-intensity energy that has to be input to run this reaction to convert the limestone to the lime or the calcium carbonate to the lime. And then the second is the fact that that processed CO2 is coming off directly. So, I think we can move to the next slide. 

And this is pretty much everything that we've already summarized. It takes a lot of process heat, and then the reaction itself emits CO2. So, CO2 capture is ideal. You can attempt to substitute other reactions. Another thing the DOE has talked about is to try to substitute carbon fibers for concrete and even steel.  And, so, there's a methane pyrolysis pathway to make structural materials for substitution. But again, those are high risk because those are building materials, and you're trying to substitute a different type of building component versus what's being done at relatively low cost by cement today. 

So that's all I had on the cement side. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Thank you. So, we covered iron and steel. We covered aluminum. We covered cement. The next area that [inaudible] is going to cover is the data center. That has not been considered before. But as all we know with the ascent of AI and ChatGPT and all the things we do, the need for data center is enormous. And would you like to cover this? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, this won't take that long. So yes, they just released a report on it. But we were just thinking about areas that potentially DOE should think about. And agriculture and forest land use for sequestration of CO2 might be industrial areas for DOE to consider or at least mention the impact of that. And then data centers equally—so this is just a graph that Mark Johnson and I were playing with a couple of weeks ago, looking at the growth of data centers versus the U.S. capacity for grid expansion. 

And, even if this is vaguely right, there's going to be a competition for that electricity. So, thinking about how this might impact decarbonization of industry, first of all, from the point of view that is—that electricity going to be available for industry to decarbonize, whether it's indirectly with hydrogen or directly. As I understand, data centers have a lot easier permitting rules than industries. So, they probably can be built a lot easier than industry. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: They have more money. 

SPEAKER: I don't know. 

[laughter] 

But there may be an opportunity as well because there is a lot of waste heat coming out of them. And capturing that for various types of purposes and [inaudible] symbiosis with other industries might be an opportunity. So, can you go on? 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Yeah, so something to consider, Joe, for future consideration. The next one, I'd like Jolene to talk about paper and pulp. So, we have a couple of slides. Please go. 

JOLENE SHEIL: Yeah, this will probably be pretty quick because, as he mentioned, we're a little bit behind. I'm not a technical person. My background is policy. So, I have called upon a couple of our—what we call on the Focus on Energy program—energy advisors that work with industrial customers, in this case paper mills because we have a lot of them in Wisconsin, 32 or so. And these folks have worked, one of them, 35 years, another one 18 years, some at a paper plant and some working in the industry and assisting them. 

So, part of what I wanted to find out today too, is kind of where we need to go and what would be most useful for them to be including in our presentation and our conversation before. How is this all going to shape out? Are we all going to have all this same information on each of these things right now? We've just been following the outline in the report. 

So, this one, we thought, was at least a good representation of all the various processes and parts of processes that are involved in the paper making process. It shows the chemical pulping and mechanical pulping and all the different aspects that could come into play that they're considering in terms of energy usage in a paper mill. Something that is not in the slide deck but also is something that we had looked at was the major sources of energy are natural gas, electricity, and biomass—biomass pulping—excuse me, biomass. 

So, all kind of right now, mainly fossil fuel based, either coal or coal that's making electricity or natural gas that's making electricity. We have a lot of projects through our program thermal that are saving gas even. When gas prices are low, these huge projects are going through to save gas. They're interested in looking more at use of solar maybe for water heating or pieces of their process. But then they also want to have the battery storage that goes with that so that they can have it 24 hours a day if it's a facility. And most of them do operate around the clock. 

And like they mentioned with a couple of other industries, very adverse to trying new things—I mean very risk averse to trying new things. As one of them put it, it's like, look, I'm shutting down a line for a day to install this thing. And if it doesn't work, I'm in big trouble. So, they really have to be sure that something's going to work. So, anything with the decarbonization that comes along, it's probably going to be an interesting sell for them. And their payback is not long. They won't do projects unless it's like 18 months to 2 years payback. 

So, when we had our subcommittee conversations and the 10 years came up with—I can't remember what our specific technology we were talking about—I'm like, oh gosh, that's going to be an interesting sell for some of these people. But next slide just shows what the energy consumption is kind of relating to the previous slide. Broken out by end use in a pulp mill, and a paper mill might be slightly different levels there. 

So, like I said, what we're trying to do is get a sense of how far to go with some of these, where we need to dig in more. I noticed some of you guys went to the decarbonization components as well, like what could they be looking at. That's not necessarily in the outline. So maybe we need to include that and go that next step, which is fine. But that's what we have. And also getting a timeline, when do we want to have a first cut at all of this so that I can go back to them and let them know what they need to be working on in addition to their job with the paper mill. So [inaudible]. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Thank you. Hey, Joe, by popular demand, you're going to finish the chemicals. 

JOE POWELL: All righty. Great. Well, yeah, I'm the other Joe here today. So, this is the DOE slide on showing the carbon intensity of the chemicals industry and refining is way up there as well. So, let's go to the next slide. So, these are the big products and chemicals. Ammonia is huge, and it's going to expand tremendously as a—excuse me—a hydrogen vector. And that's already being tackled in that mode, bringing in renewable electricity with water to do electrolysis to make the hydrogen and then the ammonia synthesis, or taking natural gas, capturing the CO2, and then reacting that hydrogen with nitrogen out of the air to make ammonia. 

And, so, there are umpteen players across the world doing blue or green ammonia projects today and targeting—taking it, say, from the U.S. Gulf Coast or Chile or Australia and targeting Japan, where they really incentivize decarbonized fuels.  And, so, major industrial plays being looked at for that today. Looking at the rest of the chemical industry and particularly the hydrocarbon chemical industry, as Joe mentioned this morning, it's incredibly complex, diverse, and integrated. Quite often, it's integrated into refineries as well. 

And, so, what I'd like to focus on is the dominant molecule here, which is ethylene. So today, it's produced in the United States from natural gas liquid ethane. And we're blessed with a tremendous amount of it coming out of the fracking era. The amount of energy needed to crack ethane into ethylene is low. It's a very efficient process, but it's very large. And hence, it has a very large CO2 footprint. 

So, if you're looking at what to do for that going into the future, you have to consider the fact that the scope 1 and 2 emissions for ethylene and most of this hydrocarbon chemical industry is small relative to the scope 3 emissions, which is what happens to it at end of life.  And, so, these materials are either put into a landfill or incinerated at end of life. So, U.S. landfills, about 20%—or excuse me, 80%, Europe landfills, about 20%—and the flip-flop of that is incinerated. There's going to be a lot more of incineration in the future. 

And, so, these have very, very large scope 3 emissions that all the multinational players worry about in terms of how do we provide these molecules going forward. So, if you're looking at decarbonizing ethylene, the latest cracker in Pennsylvania cost $20 billion with a B to develop.  And, so, you can look at doing an e-cracker for that and bringing in renewable energy. Shell and Dow have already—Shell and Dow have already demonstrated that at the pilot scale. 

But there's very, very limited incentive to go beyond that. And the reason is you can't take a $20 billion asset and do demand response because the economics are just insufferable. You've got to have a 24-7 production, and energy storage costs are too high to be affordable relative to renewable energy costs. So, Dow is looking at putting in a nuclear for a 24-7. It takes 1 to 1.5 gigawatts for one of these integrated refining and ethylene producing facilities, so very, very high energy demand. 

And, so, going the renewables route for the process energy really is challenged on the electrification side because of the very, very high capital cost and the need for energy storage. And the issue that the scope 3 emissions are going to require a different feedstock going into the future. We'll talk about that on the next slide. And, so, companies are doing the R&D to be in a position to do things like e-crackers here. They also look at technologies like ethane, oxidative dehydrogenation, or methane oxidative coupling to ethylene. Far and good, but they don't address the future scope 3 emission problem. And, so, companies pilot these things, show that they can be done, but there's really no driver to be implementing because of that future problem. 

So, let's go to the next slide and talk about that further. I'm just coming off of the Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage National Academies Committee. That's been a 2.5-year job. These reports are actually 684 and 187 pages. We were chartered to look at what are the infrastructure needs for CO2 utilization or decarbonizing industry and other sectors as opposed to storage, and then what do those economics look like. So, we had to cover a good part of the space that this committee is covering for the industrial sector decarbonization. 

To make a long story short, if you're going to be utilizing CO2, it has to be a renewable or a bio-atmospheric or biogenic CO2 to go into products that can go into utilization products because they are re-emitted. And, so, if you're taking a fossil CO2 and going to be capturing and utilizing it, at best, you can cut the CO2 footprint in half. But starting with a bioethanol-off gas or a direct-air capture CO2, you can have a complete profile reduction. 

And the energy required to convert CO2 back into usable hydrogen-carbon products is very substantial. It's four times more than the energy that would be required to take the same amount of renewable energy to decarbonize the grid. So, you really have to be careful about bringing CO2 back into utilizable products as a way of decarbonizing using those products because of the very, very high energy inputs that go with that. 

So, let's go to the next slide. Industry has already done studies in terms of what that future will look like. We just had a workshop at Houston in June inviting the major players in chemicals and refining in terms of what that looks like. And, so, you have to realize that the intent of the future economy is to recycle more of the petroleum and natural gas feedstocks, which are shown there in the gray, and then substitute those with either biogenic or atmospherically derived feedstocks, which are the light blues, deep blues, and greens and then yellows going up, into the future. 

And, so, again, the reason for that is that the end of life, those still have CO2 emissions if you consider scope 3. And Europe is passing a lot of regulations in that space. So, you cannot afford, given that these are global products, a major export market opportunity for the U.S. You've got to pay attention to those global trends in terms of what are you going to be doing to pivot the economy. 

And, so, one of the reasons you wouldn't be building that e-cracker to replace that $20 billion asset that was just built in Pennsylvania is because your feedstock needs to change to be considering CO2 or bio-derived feedstocks coming into these new processes or recycle materials coming out of the plastics waste stream, which is cracking a different type of material. And you could consider perhaps, e-cracking but basis upon that different feedstock. 

The other issue is that China has overbuilt the ethylene capacity tremendously, such that ethylene prices are going to be depressed well into the 2030s. The industry is really in a recession. And, so, it may do a little bit of a positioning of a research-scale facilities, but there's no way a new cracker is going to be built well before into the 2030s because we have a incredible oversupply of cracking capacity to make ethylene as that key intermediate because of the actions of the Chinese and their economy. And it's going to take a long time for the global chemical industry to recover to be building any new capacity in that space. 

But what the entities are looking, then, at is shown in this particular graph. You would be considering taking in recycle feedstocks into that future chemical economy. And then you have to consider the thermodynamics of that. So, it's still always going to be cheapest to take the natural gas liquids and the petroleum we have today because they come out of the ground as a high-energy value product and at low recovery energy costs. 

The energy required to recycle materials is higher. And especially if you start to look at biomass, it has about a fourth of the heating value of petroleum or natural gas liquids. And then CO2, if you're trying to recycle that, that has zero heating value. You have to put it in a tremendous amount of energy.  And, so, with oil prices never slated to go below $110 a barrel again because of all the fracking and those discoveries, it's going to take price subsidies to substitute out either biomass, bio-based materials, or CO2 capture from atmospheric or biogenic sources to compete with the petroleum and natural gas–derived products that we have today. 

Those are just energy and thermodynamics. And, so, you really need a policy base that can be investable for long-term investment in these new types of pathways. What you see here is the bio-based feedstocks appear to be much more economic than what you can do from CO2 capture. And again, the reason for that is wood and other bio-based materials at least have some heating value as is. And the amount of energy you have to put in to transform them is not as much as is required on the CO2 side. 

So, that was also one of the conclusions of our CO2 utilization report. So, in the future—I mean, most of the DOE's work today talks about scope 1 and 2 emissions from decarbonizing the existing manufacturing facilities that we have today. But really, what the industry is looking at is—because scope 1 and 2 is such a small portion of that overall footprint—really considering having to make this pivot to one, a large amount of materials recycle, which people are absolutely demanding. You've been seeing that in the news on plastics recycle. 

And, so, a new feedstock there where you're using that recycled material, you're doing as much mechanical as you can, and then you are cracking the plastics back to ethylene on the recycle front. But then your makeup carbon for those have to be atmospheric or biogenic. And, so, that could be bioethanol CO2 off gas. And then there's no place to go with the ethanol if we get out of liquid fuels. And, so, you have to look at ethanol to ethylene as the other way to get into that play. And because those already have energy content, those are going to be lower cost than the direct air capture approach there at the gold that the very top. 

So, industry has already done a lot of those simulations. And the types of things they're considering are looking at the pivot to these new manufacturing technologies, and you won't see that much investment in the existing infrastructure today because we're overcapacity and overbuilt. And the global economy is pivoting to a circular one. Next slide. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: That's the last slide. 

JOE POWELL: OK. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, I think we should hold discussion on this topic and hold the discussion period later. And I think this is a discussion slide. So, let's save that for after the cross-cutting subcommittee, and we'll do a combined discussion of— 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: This one, the last slide, the table, we should discuss later. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: With that, let's welcome Joe Palladino from the Office of Electricity. Hi, Joe. Thanks for coming. Feel free to stand up at the front or— 

JOE PALLADINO: Sure. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Wherever you feel comfortable, the camera won't see you, but that's OK. 

SPEAKER It seems to work over here. Mic seems to work better over here. Right where you—right there. 

JOE PALLADINO: OK, good. I won't go any further. [inaudible] 

SPEAKER: This is a little bit of a change of pace from the conversation we were just having, but I know several members have raised an interest in how DOE is thinking about industrial electrification. So, Joe is here to—the third Joe, for the record, is here to represent the Office of Electricity perspective. We're also going to have some discussion on this tomorrow when Bobby is here to talk about IEDO's activities. So, thank you, Joe. 

JOE PALLADINO: No, thank you. And thank you for asking us to be here. We really, really appreciate it. But what I'm really going to do is really talk about what we're focused in the Office of Electricity. But there is a merger and a convergence, obviously, between what people are doing at the [inaudible] of it. And I'm going to talk about that. And there's going to be—it has to be a lot more coordination that's going to happen to be able to really figure out what our grid investment strategies need to be. And that's going to be—that's a major challenge today to be able to determine what that coordination is. 

So, if you go to the next slide, I just wanted to give a brief overview of Office of Electricity. I'm assuming that you guys know a lot about the electric grid. But quite honestly, let me just say—you probably already know this—it's undergoing a major transformation these days. And the reason it's going through that transformation is because we've got more renewables on the grid now. And they provide variable power supply. 

We've got the distributed energy resources. We've got all these assets now at the edge of the grid that are able to provide power, be able to reduce power, and with new participants in the grid as well. So, we have to figure out—How are we going to coordinate all these resources? How are we going to coordinate all these folks so that we actually can utilize these assets in an operational environment? So that's a major challenge. 

And then, finally, we've got unprecedented load growth that we're looking at these days with electrification. But beyond electrification, there are data centers, right? And these data centers are—the Googles or the Amazons, et cetera, will come to a utility, and they'll say, I need 1 gigawatt of energy in 18 months. And, so, the question now becomes, how do you supply that power. What kind of grid upgrades do you need, transmission system wise or whatever wise to be able to accommodate those power requirements? 

And just heard that one of the reactors at Three Mile Island is being turned on, as you know, just to be able to feed the data center. So, we've got all of this stuff that's happening. It's not the grid that we had 20 years ago. It is where you've got a pretty reasonable understanding of what power supply is going to be. And you have a pretty reasonable understanding of what the load is going to be, and you just design your system to be able to accommodate load growth. Now there's so much variability in the system that we really have to start rethinking about how the grid is actually designed. 

And, so, the Office of Electricity—really the purpose—the mandate—the focus of the Office of Electricity is as we move through this transition—whatever the drivers are, whether it's a push for more oil and gas or whether it's a push for more renewables, et cetera—we want to make sure that as we move through this transition, that the grid operates in a real, coherent, efficient, effective manner, and we're able to sustain a reliability, resilience, affordability, security, and all of those things. So, we're really, really interested to make sure that the electric grid is fundamentally operating in a highly reliable and resilient manner, no matter what that transition transformation looks like. 

And we're actually—in that sense, we're technology agnostic. So, there are basically three parts of the Office of Electricity. There's the grid systems and components part, which is really, really advanced components like transformers, solid-state transformers, solid-state substations, advanced components, and things like that, micro grids and grid enhancing technologies like [inaudible] technologies to make flow across transmission lines more efficient and things like that. We're looking at conductors and all of those kinds of things in that division. 

I'm actually a senior advisor in this division, the grid communications and controls division. And in this division, we're looking at really more system-wide issues like how do we do grid modeling, not only at the distribution system level, but at the bulk system level, but how we actually model the total system. I actually had a program that I'm going to talk a lot about today called distribution grid transformation. What it really is, is advancing our planning processes and our coordination mechanisms so that we can actually derive and develop more reasonable holistic grid investment strategies. 
We get into the reliability of the transmission system, resource adequacy, and things like that. And we have a model that was actually developed in the last administration that we're still building. And it's actually becoming pretty useful—called the North American Energy Resilience Model, which couples a natural gas system with the electric system. And, so, we can do modeling in a region of the United States to look at how those systems interface and work in a dynamic way with that model. 

We also have an energy storage division. Energy storage is a game changer. We have not had that kind of offering at all, that kind of storage potential in the electric grid. But now with energy storage, it's going to be able to provide that. Energy storage is being deployed a lot now in the United States. And in an increasing way, it's going to have a major role. And we're also doing energy storage, research, and development because we want to look at other materials. 

We want to look at different kind of battery systems like flow batteries and things—flow batteries and other kinds of not only configurations of batteries, but also kind of ingredients that those batteries used. So, things like cobalt and some of those precious materials, we're looking at ways to replace those, so we're not solely dependent upon single countries. So, the Office of Electricity is engaged in activities in each of these areas. Next slide, please. 

So, you may have seen this slide before. What we're really trying to show in this slide and along this curve is really the adoption rate of distributed energy resources. And when I talk about—when we talk about distributed energy resources, we're talking about energy efficiency, which has been around for a long time, demand response, rooftop solar, energy storage devices, grid interactive buildings, which can either supply energy or reduce the demand for energy. We're looking at those kinds of technologies that really form this super set of technologies, which we've referred to as distributed energy resources. 

And they're located mostly on the distribution system. And, so, one of the questions I guess I have— because I'm a little bit familiar with what you do, but not entirely. Negan and I actually go back and forth together on this. The folks that you work with—the industries that you work with—are going to be developing their own energy supplies. They are going to want to reduce their needs for power. They're going to own energy supplies. They may even want to provide power back into the grid. 

And, so, they sort of act like a distributed energy resource in a way because they were grid-interactive buildings. Because they're going to either reduce their demand for electricity at certain time, or they're going to provide power to the grid at a certain time. And the utility that's actually working with that manufacturing site or industry site or whatever, those folks need to come together and have an understanding of not only what the behavior is going to be of that industry site, but how to actually serve it and what kind of services can that site actually provide back to the grid. 

Because the utilities actually have to design the grid. They have to design the infrastructure and all of that to handle all of that. So, as these folks on the edge of the grid start to interface with the grid to a larger extent, there's going to have to be a lot more coordination with regard to how are we planning the grid and operationally, how we operate the grid. 
And that's where we're moving towards. We're moving towards much more coordination. There's going to be an ecosystem. I heard this recently. There's going to be an ecosystem of all these players at the grid edge. We've got people that want to provide virtual power plants. And they're going to be using all these aggregated distributed energy resources. Customers are going to have their own distributed energy resources. 

These grid-interactive buildings will have their own resources, and they're going to interact with the grid. There's going to be a lot of variability. And we need to actually start to take a look at that ecosystem and figure out how to coordinate all the players in that ecosystem, again, with regard to planning, operations, and also market designs, and things like that. So, we're headed there, and we don't have the solutions yet in play to be able to do this in a really organized way today. 
We don't have those capabilities. Those practices are not in place. So, the Department of Energy—I am, and others are, involved with working with regulators, the utilities, and state energy offices around the country—go direct with those folks to really understand where is this headed, provide guidance to really figure out how do we standardize processes as we move forward. So, what this is showing here is—this yellow curve is showing an increased adoption rate of distributed energy resources. 

And one could say, in general, that 5 to 10 years ago, we didn't really have to—DERs were not a major thing. Energy efficiency was there, demand/response. But rooftop solar, energy storage systems—all of these things that you're seeing popping up today—they really weren't affecting the grid in terms of how we plan it, how we operate it. They had, really, no material change to the way we actually operate the grid. 

This is where we were, again, 5, 10 years ago. And it was states like New York state and California and Hawaii that really began to start looking, back in the mid-teens 2010s how do we start to utilize these energy resources in a more meaningful, effective way? And they put processes in place. These states put processing processes in place to really think about how to use distributed energy resources. 

Today, one could say—and this is not consistent across the country. Our country is highly balkanized with respect to how we design and implement policies and stuff like that, almost on a state-by-state basis. 

But one could say, in general, that today, we're sort of at Stage 2 with regard to the adoption rate of distributed energy resources. We're trying to utilize them to reduce demand. We're trying to utilize them to bring power back into the system. 

And, all of a sudden, now, because DERs are becoming more prevalent—are injecting power back into the system, et cetera, we have to really start thinking about, how do we advance our planning processes so we can get in front of this? And we have to think, now, about, what kind of visibility do we need to those assets, and what kind of control do we need to those assets? And the term “coordination” becomes really paramount here. 

I didn't understand what coordination was, like, 8 years ago. But really what it is—because DERs—many of them are not owned or controlled by utility. They're owned by customers—utility customers or consumers. They're operated and controlled by DER aggregators and things like that. 

Because they're not owned or controlled by a utility, it's changed paradigm from one of control to one of control and coordination. We need rules—coordination rules—by which all the participants are working together. What are their respective roles and responsibilities? What are their data and information sharing requirements, et cetera? What are their codes of conduct? We need to develop—begin to develop those rules with all these participants, and we're at the very beginning of doing that. 

So, Stage 2, you've got a moderate level of DERs, or even EV integration. And we have to start really thinking about, how do we manage these distributed energy resources that are not necessarily owned by the utility of the grid edge? 

As we move up to this stage, we're talking—we have high levels of distributed energy resources and EVs and things like that. We're starting to think about, how do we optimize the energy or the demand—or the demand response that these DERs provide? In real time, how do we orchestrate them? In real time, what systems do we need to be able to optimize and orchestrate these things? 

And it includes the fact that—and this gets to the ecosystem thing. We're looking at alternative grid structures, like grid—like microgrids and nested microgrids and cellular microgrids that are talking to each other and things like that. We're moving into that kind of paradigm. 

And in this arena—and we're not there yet, for 2222, which is looking at opening up markets and distributed energy resources to provide services at the bulk-level system. That's starting to really push the envelope. 

We're looking at where we need real coordination, interjurisdictionally, between markets, coordination with regard to planning operations and market response and market management. We're moving into this paradigm. 

And, so, what we're really trying to do in the Office of Electricity is, again, work with all these folks to figure out, how do we move from here to here? And it's going to include the industrial sites and things that you guys are working with because everybody's playing in this space right now. Next slide, please? 

So, this is a snapshot of what I oversee. And here, we've got a box that says, Integrated Distribution System Planning. Now, Integrated Distribution System Planning is not actually performed—conducted across—uniformly, consistently across the country. In fact, there are only 22 states right now that are requiring their utilities to submit long-term, integrated distribution system plans. 

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about this. But it provides a great framework for taking a look at all these disparate issues and bringing them together in one place to really figure out, here are my inputs; here are my requirements; this is a state of my system; I've got these DERs; I need to move it this way; here's my holistic grid investment strategy over the next 10 years. That's what this box is all about. 

This box is Comprehensive System Planning because we're moving into a paradigm where it's not just we're doing Integrated System Planning or Integrated Resource Planning, where a utility is looking across multiple states or Transmission System Planning. Those processes are going to have to start to merge. 

And they're going to have to start to merge in a way—in a way where we're looking at multistate regional planning processes, and I'm going to get into that a little bit more. That's what this is all about. This is a system planning component of what I oversee. Here's a system design component of what I oversee. So—can I move over here? Is that OK? 
[inaudible] 

JOE PALLADINO: OK. So, this is the operational coordination box. Being able to have all the different players. The bulk system level folks—operators, the distribution system level folks, the DER aggregators, the DER owners, DER service providers coordinate operationally. And what are the rules that we need to put in place to allow that kind of operation in a real-time operating environment? 

And this box right here is looking at applying grid architecture and system engineering to take a look at designs and options around design so we can actually address the structural and functional requirements of the future system. So, System Design, Informed System Planning System Planning, Informed System Design, et cetera. 

And we're working with a lot of different folks. We work with the energy efficiency program. We work with the Grid Deployment Office, et cetera. And we have cooperative agreements in place with NARUC, NASEO, National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, NRECA, rural electric cooperatives, American Public Power Association, ESIG, EPRI, Association of Edison Illuminating Companies. 

We have agreements in place with all of these folks because we're trying to reach—again, reach out directly with these folks to really be able to figure out—How do we move through these domains in a way that actually serves the public? Next slide. And you guys can ask questions if you want. 

So, I wanted to show this slide because here are the players now. Here are all the players we had to start coordinating with in terms of, again, planning operations, market design, market operations. And it used to be, pretty much, that it was the regulator or the board working with utility to determine what the grid investment strategy [inaudible]. 

But all of a sudden, now, we're moving from determining what that grid investment strategy should be, based purely on economics, to, now, we're starting to look at resilience, equity, business development, all these different things, which means, now, that in a state, the governor's office, the legislature, the state energy office, the regulator, have to work together with their stakeholders to clearly articulate what their objectives are and what their priorities are. Being able to convey that to a utility and then for the utility to come back with a response of investment strategy. 

These processes are nascent. They're really, really nascent. We've got a lot of processes here that we developed. And state energy office has always driven energy efficiency and stuff like that. 

But for all of these folks now to come together with their stakeholders—their communities, consumers, service providers, et cetera—to really determine what their objectives are and priorities—this is a new arena, to actually begin to bring these folks together. And we've also got these DER owners of service providers, so they're in the mix as well. 

And then you take that at a state level, and now you embed that within a regional, multistate policy. This is where we're headed in terms of developing partnerships and working together in a coordinated, cooperative way to really figure out what our grid investment strategies. It's going to involve all of these players. 

Next slide? 

SPEAKER: And just a time check, Joe. We have about 15 minutes left. 

JOE PALLADINO: OK. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] time for questions, at least? 

JOE PALLADINO: OK, you got it. I'm going to just—I almost said everything I needed to say, so I'll just go through this really, really fast. This is just a picture of an Integrated Distribution System planning process. And it requires, again, for the states and communities to determine what their objectives and priorities are, translate those into planning objectives to a utility. 

It includes doing system forecasts, DER adoption, DER adoption, EV adoption, and to determine—and be able to actually do granular, locational forecasts of those. How much EV or how much am I going to see on a specific feeder within a distribution system? Methods for doing that kind of forecasting are evolving. 

And it includes doing—including climate forecasting now. Utilities are starting to work with folks that are doing climate forecasting because they're seeing temperature rise. Not only do they have to deal with increased levels of use of energy for air conditioning, et cetera, but they're going to have to actually change out their equipment because the equipment works differently at a higher temperature. 

So, all of a sudden, we're looking at climate—we're looking at climate forecasts of temperature and heat index and rainfall and all of these things feeding the asset management strategy of the utility. That is happening right now, and it's evolving. 
With those inputs, then, utility takes a look at their system. They determine, what are the core things I need to do to maintain reliability and resilience? How do I deal with these forecasts? Where's my system now? How do I need to build out my system to be able to deal with those forecasts? How do I utilize distributed energy resources and microgrids to be able to provide some of my needs? 

And then there's a planning component. There's a grid modernization strategy, again, embedded in all of this, which is, how do I build on my sensing, communication, control, information, data management, computing capabilities? How do I build that out in a way to be able to actually reach that level of orchestration that I'm talking about? What's the state strategy for doing that—the walk-jog-run strategy for doing that? And then how does all of this play into what's happening at the board-level system? Next slide? 

All I wanted to say here is—and what I said before is we're moving from—we're moving to comprehensive system planning, regional multistate planning [inaudible] for a lot of reasons. DER—DER is a part of the resource mix. How are we going to get performance out of these DERs like we get performance out of the top-level resources? 

What happens if we can't—with all the slowed growth that's happening, what happens if we can't build out enough transmission to deal with—to deal with the local load requirements? Utilities across the country are worried—really worried about this, and they're seeing a train wreck as a result of that. So, we need regional strategists to be able to deal with that. 

In other words, how much energy, capacity, ancillary services are we going to get from local resources to be able to deal with the load-growth requirements that we'll still be seeing? It's a major, major question right now. 

Strategic deployment of energy storage in this—we don't typically deploy energy storage, really, right now. But if you deployed it in a strategic way, you might really be able to handle the variability that we're seeing on the supply side and the demand side. And then looking at interdependencies between electricity and natural gas and things like that. So, again, we're moving to this regional, multistate plan. Next slide? 

I just want to say that we're working on processes to standardize operations at the grid edge. So, for instance, we developed—this a list of grid codes, is what these are. And these grid codes get into things like, how do I integrate? What are the rules around integrating DERs and microgrids into the energy system? What kind of services can they provide? 
What do I need to do, standards-wise, with regard to operations? How do I monitor and control DERs, for instance? What is the role and requirements of the utility? What are the roles and requirements of the aggregator? How do they exchange information? What are the operating agreements? What are the performance requirements? How are we going to measure performance and things like that through operating agreements? How do we share information? What information needs to be shared? How do we standardize that kind of information, et cetera? 

And what's the governance and oversight of all of this? What's the role of the regulator, for instance, in making sure that this is being managed in an equitable, fair, cost-effective manner? So, we're developing—we're actually developing great codes and looking at best practices around each of these we're having on the website and all that stuff. Next slide? This is my last slide. 

And the other thing is, we're looking at grid architecture, and we're looking at systems engineering. We've been looking at grid architecture for a really, really long time. But we're going to have to develop platforms where, now, the independent system operator will be able to work with the distribution system operator, will be able to work with these third parties, will be able to work with these industrial sites and things like that to be able to communicate and coordinate in real time. 

And they're going to have to communicate and coordinate with regard to how they oversee and coordinate with regard to the market. What are the market rules, eligibility requirements, or dispatch instructions, et cetera? Operational coordination? Again, from what I just said, how do we share information? What's a shared operational network model? If something happens to the system, how does the system change? How do we have to reoperate in a way to accommodate that system change? 

And then what's the state of these assets? How much capacity do we have in an energy storage device? And how much solar are we going to get at any particular time? We have to understand those things so that we can be able to utilize them to provide services back to the grid at any specific time. 

So, building out the capability to do all of this is—and building the platforms, architecturally, structurally to enable all these participants to work together in a highly coordinated way—this is where we're headed. So, I'll just stop right there. 

SPEAKER: I have so many questions. Thank you. This is great. If you could go back to that one slide with the curve— 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah, yeah. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: Sorry, if we could just pause. Joe, you're not a member of the committee. 

JOE PALLADINO: Oh, sorry about that. 

[laughter] 

ZACH PRITCHARD: If the committee members have questions— 

NEAL ELLIOTT: You can walk over his office and ask questions. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: You can talk to [inaudible] any time. 

SPEAKER: Does that mean he can't? 

[laughter] [inaudible] 

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, if any of the committee members have questions, maybe we handle those first. 

JOE PALLADINO: Oh, oh, oh. OK. Sorry. 

ZACH PRITCHARD: No, you're good. 

SPEAKER: But we like your enthusiasm. 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah, so— 

NEAL ELLIOTT: So I hear—I see where you're going. I think it's the right strategy. Let's take a industrial facility. I'm putting a gigawatt battery facility into South Carolina. Let's pick that state because I was just talking to Dominion about this. 
They've gotta come up with a gigawatt. They're looking to start up in 12 quarters. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: 3 years. 

JOE PALLADINO: In 3 years. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: That's when they're starting. 

JOE PALLADINO: 1 gigawatt. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: 1 gigawatt. Small battery plant. 

JOE PALLADINO: OK. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: They don't have a—Dominion do not have a gigawatt. 

JOE PALLADINO: Exactly. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: So that's—we've got a timing between sort of the utility regulatory—utility planning paradigm, which is, what, 5, 10, 15 years. We're talking 4, 8, 12 quarters. And if we go data centers, the generative AI data center is coming in in four to six quarters, and they have a gig they want to get. 

How do we deal with this reality that is currently existing in the market? 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah. No, I agree. There are a lot of discontinuities, right? There are a lot of discontinuities. So, in a situation like this, let me ask that—is the governor's office or the legislators, any of those folks involved with this matter? 

NEAL ELLIOTT: They're freaked out. 

JOE PALLADINO: They're freaked out. OK. 

[laughter] 

And then the second thought is, or consideration is—and this is where I think we have to head with all of this—there's going to have to be some stage strategy, I think, between the utility and this industry site, this industrial site owner, because some of the energy is going to be purchased or brought in by the industry folks, right? But then the utility may want to come into some sort of agreement to determine, OK, what's our stage strategy for getting you what you need? 
Because this gets really complicated because then, going back to the legislature or the governor's office, maybe they want that industry site to be there because it's a good—it's good for business. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] Politics 

JOE PALLADINO: Right? And the utility, the utilities, quite honestly, are kind of between a rock and a hard place often, because the regulator only allows a certain amount of investment. So, you almost—in a situation like this, you almost have to get policymakers involved to drive the prioritization strategy because ultimately, someone's going to have to pay, whether it's a taxpayer or a ratepayer. Folks are going to have to figure out, is it going to be tax based or this is rate based? 

And they're going to have to be some sort of agreement that's put in place between all of these folks that we can support your need, but this is the strategy that we need to undertake to be able to provide the power that you need. And, so, [inaudible] of these folks, as you know, are making deals with small modular nuclear reactor folks as well, which could take a hell of a long time to be able to put an [inaudible] in place. 

But I think it's going to require going back to that drawing with all the dots that I had. I think this is where it's political. The policymakers really might want to have something like that in their region. There's going to have to be some concerted strategy. I'm just saying this. I mean, I know it's not easy to do this, but some concerted strategy to help the utility figure out how to do this. That's kind of a vague answer, but I'm not sure how to—that make sense? 

[laughter] 

SPEAKER: In theory, makes a lot of sense, but— 

JOE PALLADINO: But hard to get there? 

SPEAKER: I don't see it happening in our state, much less, say, on a regional basis, with the politics the way it is. 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. 

[inaudible] 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Just a quick comment. More a comment than a question. I think, while industries may use DER and distribute energy generation and certainly could be flexible about the times they consume it, the net effect will be a much greater demand for electricity by industry, whether it is directly for things like industrial heating or indirectly to form green hydrogen that they then use for chemical feedstocks. 

I've done some computer modeling of this. And a clean industrial sector, including feedstocks, could—a shift to that could drive about 2.3% electricity demand growth nationally for about 30 years, which is similar to the historical rate. But that's just for the shifting of industry. And anything for electric vehicles or whatever would be on top. 

So, I agree with the comments about planning for demand growth, not just for data centers and the like, but also for clean industry. 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah. Yeah. There's more pressure to reduce the footprint of that power plant [inaudible] for the [inaudible]. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Energy—yeah, energy efficiency, material efficiency can reduce the power requirement. And that can really help. 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah. There was a study done by Synapse for the DC government that you may have seen. And the DC government was saying, given our decarbonization objectives, et cetera, electrification objectives, how are we going to be able to meet that? And the Synapse study basically said energy efficiency was going to be the major resource that's going to actually be able to help them really get there. 

SPEAKER: Do you foresee additional deregulation that would allow more opportunity to work across lines? I'm thinking about—and I'm sharing [inaudible] one's name—but one of our plants is kind of on the edge of a particular electrical territory. And, sometimes, there might be opportunities to work with the other provider, but we can't work with the other provider. Or we look at trying to get a PPA, but it might be easier to get VPPA somewhere else. But we're worried about, does the VPPA have credibility long term? So, do you see any future where those lines might become more blurred? 

JOE PALLADINO: Again, I really—I think we have to get into this regional plan [inaudible] everything, based on what I said. The system was never designed from the top down. It was sort of designed from the bottom up. And, so, now we've got all these discontinuities we have to [inaudible], and that's just one of them. I don't have a solution for you, but I think this is the kind of coordination that we have to really start to figure out. 
[inaudible] 

SPEAKER: We're going to let Joe talk. 

JOE PALLADINO: All right. [inaudible] Joe court. Joe, we can have a conversation during the break, if you want to. 
[inaudible] 

SPEAKER: No, I just want to ask one single question that is, I think, helpful for this group. And this is very much in line with what Jeffrey said. On this chart, and in most of what you showed, Joe, you are talking about distributed energy resources, which is either production or storage. 

And Jeff's point about demand is where I was going. This is essentially a scenario, certainly with increased adoption of EVs. Whether or not people put solar on their roof, it's still storage. 

JOE PALLADINO: Yeah. 

SPEAKER: My question, then, is, if you looked at this, have you done some scenarios looking specifically at industry? You could imagine that a certain amount of uptake—microgrids, onsite energy—it could flatten out. It may be usurped. The idea of industry being their own—also utility—is not going to be in it for everyone. 

My question is, is that a gap in analysis that could be done collectively across-- wondering more about that the—the [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: Great. Thanks. Welcome back. We are going to move on to the report out from the subcommittee on cross-cutting technologies and opportunities. And then after that, we'll do a combined discussion of cross-cutting in industrial subsectors, subcommittees, and other general discussions [inaudible]. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Zach. So, we started this committee under the leadership of Eric Masanet, who has taken a partial leave of absence from UC Santa Barbara to be here at DOE. So, he had to recuse himself from this committee in the middle of September—September? 

ZACH PRITCHARD: I'm not sure of the exact date, but that sounds right. 

SPEAKER: [inaudible] 15th of September. And Zach and Sharon asked me to step in and take over the lead for the committee. The committee is made up of Sridhar, Jeff Rissman, Jolene, myself, Comas Haynes, and Sharon Nolan, and we were looking at trying to understand what are these cross-cuttings. So, thanks to Jeff's and my activities with respect to the outline committee, this helped us do the crosswalk. 

And, so, what we did is begin to look in what we needed to do. One of the things we very quickly realized was we were outside our expertise. And, so, we approached Zach about the possibility of bringing in an outside expert to assist the subcommittee. And he indicated that was acceptable. So, Sharon was able to facilitate bringing Neal Brown from Eastman in to help us look at the direct use of heat from renewable energy and bioenergy in the topics. 

So, if I can get the next slide, that'll give you the topics that are here. And these are the same I mentioned this morning—energy efficiency, material efficiency. So, these are, if you will, thinking about the roadmap and the liftoff report in order. Circular economy, then electrification, dynamic load management, which then relates to the electrification; the use of low-GHG hydrogen for industrial firms and direct use, as we talked about this morning; carbon capture, utilization, and storage within the industrial facility; the infrastructure needs of industry—this is the ability of industry to access external infrastructure necessary to support the technology; and then identify non-CO2 greenhouse gases into methane and the F-gases [inaudible] morning. 

So, if we move on to the next slide, so what you'll see on this slide is a definition of what we think is in scope. And these slides are up on Box so you're able to access—the committee is able to access these. And we have a lead for each of the topics. Sharon has consented to lead the energy efficiency. 

And, so, as you see up there, it's generally seen as the first and most cost-effective decarbonization strategy and lists a whole bunch of stuff there with respect to what captures energy efficiency and includes analytic techniques and anomaly detection, so moving sort of more into the smart technology. Clearly, some overlaps between energy efficiency and material efficiency, and then looking at who are the other groups external to—or external to IEDO, so the ENERGY STAR Industrial Partnership program at [inaudible], the Better Plants Program run out of the [inaudible], ACEEE, and then various utilities across the country who run—are actually the primary deliverer of industrial energy efficiency. 

Moving on to the next one, material efficiency. And I'm leading that one. And this is the idea that material efficiency is addressing the amount of materials needed to produce a given good or service, reducing required resources, including energy, water, waste, pollution, labor, and environmental damage. Want to have input on what are the overlaps. And based on today's discussion, we can go back and look at that. 

Looking at major market players, manufacturers, the customers of those manufactured products, the purchasing agents who are specifying products, and then the policymakers who are creating the rules of the road, if you will, for the marketplace. Would note that material efficiency includes the substitution of information services for material physical material or assets. So, this is actually, in a lot of the world, referred to as dematerialization, where you're basically taking a physical good, such as a vinyl record or CD, and replacing that with a streaming service. So that would be material efficiency. 

You can move on to the next one, circular economy. And I will note we have tried to do a lot of things. And there's some very busy people, like Jeff Rissman, who was actually on sabbatical during this period doing not this, supposedly, but he still contributed a lot of other things. So, circular economy, which has yet to be populated. 

If I can get the next slide, electrification. This is Sridhar working with Jeff Rissman. Electrification of process heating at all temperature ranges using technologies. Also, electricity can sometimes replace heating entirely, as in a nonthermal use of electricity such as electrolysis or UV coating or electrochemistry. Electrification clearly overlaps with low greenhouse gas hydrogen, which would be if it's produced by electrolysis, and self-generation, some of the activities of the subcommittee. And as we get into the committee discussions, we should probably assess those. 

Jeff identified Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and Renewable Thermal Collaborative as two groups that are involved in analysis in this space. I would also note, probably, Energy Innovations is another that's working in this space as well. Moving on to the next topic, low greenhouse gas. Comas Haynes, thank you. 

So, low-GHG hydrogen herein regards hydrogen that is used as a primary compound and process, the agent under the box there, that have little to no associated cogeneration or greenhouse gases— cogeneration of greenhouse gases. Industry is thus able to use this as clean chemical feedstock and/or fossil fuel substitution in place of either a fossil fuel or a steam methane reform produced hydrogen. Again, overlaps. At this point, we're looking to identify those. 

So, market or policy actors. Industrial offtakers—these would be people who are users of low greenhouse gas hydrogen. Suppliers, i.e., providers of low greenhouse gas hydrogen—we see some of the industrial gas companies entering this market, but potentially others in specialty area. 

Regulatory authority standards committee, who sort of are necessary to establish rules of the road for this expanded marketplace, and then clearly policymakers. We were talking with hydrogen. The tax credits that are offered by Treasury, for example, would be there. And then note that the chemical processing industry, where it's a feedstock or coreactant, and then it also can be used as a storage medium for electricity, essentially, in a plant operation. 

Then get the next one. Direct use of heat from renewable sources and bioenergy. And again, this was Neil Brown from Eastman. The replacement of the direct or indirect, e.g., steam, for example, is indirect fossil fuel use with solar thermal or geothermal heat sources or with a bioenergy resource, either directly or as a substitute for a fossil fuel. Overlaps direct use of renewables, and bioenergy has some overlaps in the electrification space. Low-GHG hydrogen is a potential competing resource. And then self-generation subcommittee, again, looking primarily at the wood products industry or someplace like that. Market policy actors subcommittee is working on that. 

Notes—direct use of heat from solar thermal or geothermal, inclusive of storage. This does not include electricity generation. And then bioenergy, solid, liquid, or gaseous as a feedstock or burned as energy as a replacement for a [inaudible]—a fossil hydrocarbon resource. 

Moving on to the next one, self-generation. Sharon, you can correct me on anything I say wrong since you wrote this. So, self-generation is typically referred to as combined heat in power plants where steam and electricity are cogenerated. In addition, self-generation can refer to on-site generation using solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric technologies. Overlaps potentially on the CCUS committee related to the use of fossil fuel on a CHP system to decarbonize it. And then the infrastructure needs and industry, as in if more electricity is needed to be purchased. 

Among the groups that are involved, Council of Industrial Boiler Owners? Is that CIBO? Is that correct? 

SHARON NOLEN: Boiler operators. 

SPEAKER: Operators. Thank you. And then utility regulators, FERC, RTOs potentially would, could restrict interconnection and sell-back and other relationships. 

And then moving on to the carbon capture utilization and sequestration, and I'm leading that. And this is the capture of CO2 from industrial process or combustion, one, in its use to produce a product, and this would be an example—sublime, who are capturing CO2 to produce a [inaudible] as product that can be used in concrete operations. Or another would be Lanzajet, which is capturing CO2 to produce a sustainable aviation fuel through a bio process. 

Overlaps industrial sectors. Since many of the CO2 processes are specific to the Industrial Sectors Committee, there are also DOE working gaps in that we are talking in this case about the fossil energy and Carbon Management Office here within DOE, which is doing a lot of work on carbon capture utilization and storage. So, as that guidance to that office coming out of the subcommittee would apply, utilization needs, at least in the discussions we've had, has excluded the use of captured CO2 [inaudible]. So, that was not considered in scope for this discussion. 

And then, finally, think we have infrastructure needs, and again, I'm leading that. Physical infrastructure that supports the delivery of resources necessary for decarbonization success, such as electricity, hydrogen, water, and the takeaway of materials from sites such as CO2, wastewater, or solid waste as necessary. Overlaps here would include barriers and industrial sectors. Discussion, again, with those are specific to a covered industry. 

A lot of market actors here. We have DOE, who are instrumental in, as we heard with the Office of Electricity, the U.S. EPA from the standpoint of your support on air and water and waste issues, in terms of regulation, as well as enabling the investment of infrastructure. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as it relates to electricity. National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, associated, again, with respect to electricity. The electric utilities themselves, the water and wastewater utilities, and then the state and local governments and regulators who have oversight of electricity, water, solid waste management issues, environmental regulation—and a lot in terms of siting and permitting type thing. 

And then finally, non-CO2 greenhouse gases, which we decided at the very last minute to add, and Jeff never got around to adding that yet. If you want to say anything on non-CO2 gases. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Sure. I don't need the slides. I'll just say a bit on circular economy, which was the earlier blank one, and this one. I must have been out on the day—these slides—because I didn't know. Usually they are. So circular— 

NEAL ELLIOTT: You were at an all-site retreat. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: OK. Yeah, it was busy. So, circular economy first. So, that's essentially the idea of putting products and materials to their highest and best use at each point in their life cycle. So ideally, the number one priority would be longevity. Make products last longer before they break. 

And the whole idea behind all of these is to reduce the demand for new materials, which, like material efficiency, reduces the energy use and the water and labor impacts and so on, reduces all of the requirements and impacts. So, longevity is sort of priority 1—designing products to be repairable and last longer. 

You could also put in this bucket intensification of product use, product-sharing systems like tool-lending, libraries, co-working spaces, ride-sharing systems, or public transit. Sort of priority 2 would be transfer or resale, making sure that the product can be transferred to new users. It isn't software locked to the original registrant, that there's means for a secondary market for these goods. Repairable, I already mentioned. 

Refurbishment or remanufacturing is sort of priority 3, where the product needs some fixing or cleaning but still is usable or has usable components that could be placed into a new product that works well. And recycling of the materials would be priority 4. If you can't remanufacture it or reuse its components, at least you can perhaps melt down and reuse the materials. 

And then there are mechanisms, things like expanded producer responsibility systems or how to write repair guidance or how to encourage producers to make their products in a way that makes them more repairable or more recyclable or uses more recycled material since there needs to be a demand for recycled material in order for recycling to work, for there to be a market. The other one is non-CO2 greenhouse gases. So, that essentially means methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases, fluorinated gases. From industry here, we'll focus on—rather than across—the economy. 

So, methane from industry is going to be mainly leakage from equipment, either natural gas-using equipment or fertilizer plants that may be using it to form their product, steam methane reforming to make ammonia, to make fertilizer. So, that can be addressed generally by addressing leakage or in the longer- or medium-term shifting away from methane feedstocks to fully decarbonized feedstocks like we've discussed earlier. Nitrous oxide, N2O, is mainly a by-product of nitric and adipic acid manufacturing, and it's comparatively easier to address because you can catalytically or thermally decompose it rather than just venting it. You can achieve high destruction rates, 99% or better, with the right equipment at reasonable cost. 

I think the U.S. even recently announced a voluntary agreement with the main adipic and nitric acid manufacturers to implement that sort of technology, even in the absence of any sort of binding standard. There's only a limited number of plants that really applies to. There are other chemical industry processes that produce a small amount, but that covers the bulk of it. 

F-gases in some ways are the trickiest because there's a variety of them. They're used as refrigerants, the working fluid in air conditioners and refrigerators, propellants in aerosols and foam-blowing agents, as well as some less common applications. And, some are produced as the by-product of manufacturing other F-gases. 

So, the main thing that the chemicals industry can do here is research and develop climate-safe alternatives to today's F-gases, which themselves are often alternatives to older ones that were not safe for the ozone layer. There are also methods of destruction or recycling of F-gases in old products and ends of life, although that's hard to control for once the products have been sold. And I think that pretty much covers the main topics for non-CO2 GHGs. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: OK, that's it. And, so, comments, questions? And again, the slides are up there, and everything is in the cross-cutting subcommittee, so would welcome feedback to folks. Want to go through and make sure. And we're focused, and I would say [inaudible], the reason we've included—and kudos to Cathy for making this suggestion for her committee, the subcommittee she leads—the Market and Policy Actors Credit—what we're trying to do is understand how does this fit within the marketplace? So that we're not just talking about a technology issue, but we're talking about how this works dynamically within a particular industrial market value chain and what have you. 

SHARON NOLEN: Any comments for Neal or the subcommittee? 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: Just want to add that there is thermally generated NOx, high temperature [inaudible]. It needs to be considered. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Well, NOx and N2O are different. NOx is usually NO2 or NO3, and it's not an important greenhouse gas. And N2O, nitrous oxide, is the important greenhouse gas. If it's generated thermally, let's talk about that. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: Yeah, I mean, this is something we are familiar with in this industry. As the temperature of the melting process increases, the likelihood of forming NOx increases, and it's something that we try to control. 

SHARON NOLEN: Your comment? 

SPEAKER: Very quick. Black carbon. Have you considered that as a— [inaudible] particulate perspective? 

SPEAKER: Yes. Well, it's considered a short-term climate forcer, but as a greenhouse, it has a large [inaudible]. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: [inaudible] I mean as an aerosol. Or not an aerosol, but— 

SPEAKER: Yeah, it has a radiative forcing, a significant one. It's much larger than [inaudible]. 

JOE POWELL: The N2O comes mostly from nylon production. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Yeah, right, which is the main use of adipic acid. So, that's right. And as far as black carbon, that hasn't been in scope at this point. It was just non-CO2 greenhouse gases rather than particulates. But if that's something we should cover, we can look into that. Sure. 

JOE POWELL: It seems like there's quite a bit of overlaps between all of the individual sectors and the cross-setting, because yeah, we have so very many common technologies that are going in to decarbonize each of our individual sectors. And, so, I guess coordination between the cross-sectors group and all of the industrial sectors groups are going to be really highly important here. 

SPEAKER: All of the solutions for black carbon are going to be environmental. Probably regulation. We're talking to the Secretary of Energy. What would be the recommendation? Talk to EPA? Talk to Congress? I'm just pushing back a little bit because I'm trying to think through what's the next action that [inaudible] going to recommend. 

JEFFREY RISSMAN: Well, that's what we're hoping to begin to move forward with after as an outcome of this meeting. I mean, I do think we are concerned about overlap with other committees, and so I would say overlap things that are, I'm going to use the term not what you think are not material, so therefore we shouldn't include them. They're not a priority or omissions, things that are cross-cutting topics that we have not considered. 

And again, this very much tracks with the outline that we were looking at this morning, so we're essentially evolving in parallel. So please, please feedback to us, and we welcome this, and we would love to drop things. We are very concerned about making page count for this section. But anyway, we welcome feedback, so please provide that to the [inaudible] Caroline, [inaudible], Sharon, or to me directly or to whoever the topic lead is [inaudible]. 

SHARON NOLEN: That's right, everybody. Again, we have the Miro board, so that's a good place to get specific comments. 

SPEAKER: I would say, in the interest of honing in the outline at this meeting, to the extent that people see something immediately that they think doesn't belong or should be added, please speak up now. Maybe not forever hold your peace, but for the most part. 

CATHY CHOI: My question is actually to the sector [inaudible], so [inaudible] and his team. Data centers—I'm not sure when that was added as an industry. I can see why it's a concern from an energy consumption standpoint because they use so much energy, but it's not really an industrial process. So, I'm wondering from a scope standpoint, should data centers be within the scope of the report? That's my question. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: I mean, this is a question that was posed by the Secretary's advisory committee in their piece that Zach was alluding to this morning, because I think it's a topic that is somewhat of an orphan topic within DOE. So, at this point, nobody seems to own it. 

SPEAKER: That's a way to describe it too. 

SPEAKER: I don't think we have a strong opinion that it's not a manufacturing process, but is it an industry? I don't know. Some people consider utilities an industry. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: I think it's a good point [inaudible] because you were talking about decarbonization of industry, but the data center uses energy, and it's competing with the industry. We're talking about not necessarily decarbonizing the industry itself, but it's a scope to emissions in terms of energy use. I don't know. It doesn't matter to me how we [inaudible] classify [inaudible] outside the industrial sectors, or it can be within. 

SPEAKER: We can definitely mention that [inaudible] You may not [inaudible] more in a separate study or separate couple of pages. That's our intent, was to—hey, look. This sector is growing. And same way with battery materials become a cobalt or rare Earth metals, they're all metals. They all extract. Extraction process is not that different from extracting copper or magnesium or aluminum. They should be acknowledged, that these are the sectors of importance. And it should be at least studied at some other time, if not this time. 

SHARON NOLEN: Yeah, Cathy. 

CATHY CHOI: Yeah. I just understand. But, for example, when it comes to data centers, unless we're going to talk about them supplying their own energy or how they could potentially have—what would we recommend in the data center space? There's not really any technologies we're talking about here because they don't produce anything. They provide a service in general. So that's why I'm questioning it. 

SPEAKER: Yeah. Again, I don't think we're saying that we have to include it as a sector, but just pointing out that it is an energy-consuming, I guess, business as such. And I think there are some opportunities that are peripheral that produce a lot of waste heat that could be potentially used for powering low-grade process heat—for example, if they're located adjacent to manufacturing industry. So, they could be part of that solution, as an example. But yeah, I think it would be disingenuous not to mention it, but then we don't have to cover it. I think that's up to the committee. 

JOE POWELL: Yeah. Then you have the whole refining and fuel sector. So, basically, if you consider scope 3, that's the biggest of them all. And—but at the end of the day, their outputs go into transportation, industry, and residential. But yeah, you could call that an industry, in essence. 

So, at the end of the day, the breakdown comes down to some subsectors of that. But there's a whole level of transformation in the [inaudible] key of taking the raw resources and then converting them into electricity and then having those go into the different sectors. 

Data centers being one of the big services hogs there off of the electricity side, I'm wondering if that needs its own node in addition to commercial and residential, or how that works. But yeah, similarly, we talked about chemicals, but then a lot of that's integrated in refining and chemicals. 

And I guess we're saying refining is more or less going to be abandoned and not going to have a lot of investment in decarbonization, although you could almost argue that that's an existing industry. There are certainly electrification efforts in that whole refining and gas and fuels production side that that's going on as well that's missing from the report. 

SPEAKER: Right [inaudible]. 

SPEAKER: To Cathy's point, I think about data centers as a consumer. And I think about a big consumer and a growing consumer and an impact on where the industrial sector needs to go. So, I see them as something that is going to limit the availability of electrons for industry to decarbonize or inefficiently use the limited renewable energy that is on the grid. So, that's how I tend to think about it. So, maybe they're a barrier. [laughs] 

SPEAKER: Yeah, maybe it is a barrier. That's true. 

SPEAKER: Add them to your group, but I think about them that way. So maybe it could be covered. And you could have it— 

SPEAKER: I just wanted to make two points. One, not to [inaudible] too much because I was just pushing people to make decisions today, but [inaudible] is going to speak some about how we're thinking about data centers tomorrow. It is very much spread across multiple offices in DOE, our approach right now. 

The other thing I'll mention about how practically the committee addresses this issue is that you can also put your weight behind the [inaudible] recommendations that have already been published, or you can add supplementally onto those, if there are things you think they missed that are relevant to an industrial approach. So, think about that, too, in the vein of not duplicating work. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, actually. So, Jeff, I was thinking about this. This is for the non-CO2 gases. And this might just be a footnote, actually, but that's something a colleague, a technical colleague even mentioned to me years ago. And I think about it from time to time. And that is, he prodded me on the fact that water is a greenhouse gas. 

So, my point being I think it could be a footnote. I think you've got the right ones listed, but every now and again, you'll hear someone maybe rib and say that that comes up. So, it might. I don't think we need to change the title, but I think maybe, if you just qualified, like you said, what we focus on, but maybe put—it could be a footnote. 

That's what keeps coming to mind—something that speaks to that fact, the context of water, even. Because I guess even with us having a low GHG hydrogen as a part of our subcommittee as well, which I felt, primarily, we were looking at as a feedstock, but it can also be used as the source of energy, workforce, water as a result, it might be something to have some mention about. 

SPEAKER: Oh, OK. I could respond briefly. Yeah, H2O has a strong forcing effect, but its concentration in the atmosphere is limited by the saturation point, after which it will exit as rain, which is unlike F gases or something. And most water comes from evaporation. So, it's not exactly anthropogenic. 

The main anthropogenic impact is via climate change, since the saturation point is higher when the air is warmer. So, on a warmer planet, you could get more water vapor in the air before it rains out. So, in a way, I think of it as a geophysical feedback, more like permafrost releasing methane or something in response to climate change, which I put in a different bucket in my head from humans in a factory are emitting this gas. So, there is a human linkage there, but it's a little bit indirect. So, maybe a footnote, as you say. 

SPEAKER: Agreed. And I'll just add, to your point, as of late, even seeing it, most times, if it is accounted for, it's mentioned, but it's mentioned as a feedback. It's amplifying, in a sense, maybe the other primary culprits. But again, just some mentioning of it since we're simplifying the outline and even titles and subtitles and whatnot. 

JOE POWELL: I think it's so huge, the anthropogenic contributions can't really change it. And, so, we're talking about everything else that's happening on top of the water cycle that that's driving change. I think hydrogen is the other emerging vector that has a greenhouse gas footprint, but the hydrogen economy is pretty small thus far. But people working in the space are also talking about the importance of controlling hydrogen emissions because of those indirect greenhouse gas footprints. 

SHARON NOLEN: Neal, I think you're next. 

NEAL ELLIOTT: On? Oh. 

[laughter] 

We've moved on. I wanted to mention—on data centers—I think it's very much an emerging issue, which is what was said by the Secretary's advisory committee in their report. And one of the things they have recommended is that we undertake a strategic assessment of the issue. 

Particularly, generative AI or AI data centers are just emerging in the marketplace. And even as we work with the data center developers themselves, they don't know what these are really going to look like.  And, so, I'm not sure that's something that is appropriate for us to take on at this time as the ITIAC because this is really establishing looking at a developed market. 

And I think the question of, what is industry—the data centers are currently listed as a service industry, which is inconsistent with their energy use. But that's the way it's been. It's under the NAICS code. So, there is a push to reevaluate, basically, the whole taxonomy of what we're talking about here. I would say that makes it something probably, at this point, inappropriate for the committee to undertake. 

SPEAKER: So, for, I guess, further discussion on that, we'll hear from Bobby tomorrow. So, we cut this subsector committee off before you got to this slide. So, suppose you want to talk about this slide or-— 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Yeah, we can go through it. [inaudible] did most of the writings on—OK, so you want to—why don't you talk? He did most of the work. 

[laughter] 

SPEAKER: So, this is just, I guess, areas we didn't cover, really, in our discussion and where we didn't have expertise. And these are the writing assignments that we have so far. And yeah, so, it ties into what we were discussing about whether or not we want to include some of those other areas or not. So, I guess that's up for the community to comment on it. 

SPEAKER: Yeah, I guess a question for you, I think is, so you're looking for input on whether to include these areas. And also, are you looking for volunteers who might help? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, yeah. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Red is we don't have—and one of the thinking is this, that you read all the DOE reports. And the nation is short of battery materials. The nation is short of rare earths. The nation is short of magnesium, aluminum. The list goes on. And then we get all these roadmaps and all that talk about iron and steel and aluminum. 

So, shouldn't there be one document saying that all these materials that are listed on DOD sites or critical materials—they're not on DOE site. So, there seems to be a disconnect, at least to me. And if I'm not involved with government agencies, it's one country. And DOD said these are extremely critical materials. 

We cannot fly planes unless we have this rare earths. And then DOE—we cannot run the industrial base unless we have this. So, our attempt was at least there's one document saying that these all are important materials, important sectors. They should be studied. There should be mention of that. 

JOE POWELL: Yeah. And I would say that agriculture certainly makes the European lists as a separate industry. And a lot of that has to do with the land management in addition to the fuels used. And N2O comes up again there. And, so, that can be a source or a sink and maybe one of the larger things that we're not covering currently. 

SHARON NOLEN: Should we look at these maybe one at a time? So, from iron and steel down to aluminum, are there any concerns with any of those? 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Yeah, those iron, steel, chemicals, cement, paper and pulp—we have some [inaudible] 

SPEAKER: I just want to say, I think on aluminum, you've got one primary plant left. We didn't work on it in our program because they were all evaporating out of the U.S. In fact, some of them went out of business and had contracts and made money on their energy out in the northwest years ago. So what are you going to do for secondary steel and the secondary aluminum? It's recycling. Unless you do something there and you have recommendations, maybe you leave it out. Well, in this country. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: This explosion of technologies in secondary aluminum base—there's explosion of investment—$4 billion, 5 years. 

SPEAKER: So, you have ideas then? 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Oh, yeah. Industry has many ideas, how to—see, one of the things that at least I'm promoting is the secondary is a new primer, meaning that we make two. In aluminum, we make the most scrap in the world. We export most scrap in the world. And we landfill most scrap in the world. So, if we stop landfilling and stop exporting, we don't have to import all the primaries. 

SPEAKER: So, if you're clear that it's recycled aluminum, that's very clear then. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Yeah. And slides have shown we didn't talk about primary. I just talked about recycling. Same with the steel. You can speak, but scrap is in short supply. And if you can upgrade the scrap, take care of copper and all that and scrap space— 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Just to follow up on that quickly, I am all on board on secondary aluminum steel, creating more of that circular economy. But I'd say I think there is still interest, particularly politically, in the idea of being able to potentially rebuild some of the primary— 

SPEAKER: We could reshore. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: —capacity, and yeah, reshore that— 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: There's movement there. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: —in a national security mindset. So, I don't think we should necessarily ignore primary entirely and just say, you know what? This is the history. And, so, we're just going to keep going. And maybe part of the point is to think through whether there is a need for some other intervention so that there is actually primary capacity as well. 

SASHA STASHWICK: Awesome. Well, wasn't going to comment on this—but just to add like—in fact, you can imagine many political scenarios where a lot of the additional money flowing into DOE is exactly for that purpose, or it comes from that motivation. So, I agree with Abigail. 

I was going to comment just very practically on the scope. I guess I have a strong, strong bias to narrowing our focus in the interest of honing in on a couple of really high impact recommendations as opposed to almost expanding to look economy-wide. There are intersections economy-wide with the industrial sector, but that would significantly dilute, I think, our ultimate message and recommendation. 

So, one thing that—that's just, I guess, my opinion. But one thing that Zach, you had said, was that there's potential for us to say we define this out of scope for this report, but the ITIAC can subsequently take on other critical or whatever for a dedicated examination. 

And that might be just one way to say all these intersect. We could just say, in two sentences, there's the following intersections. We're conscious of them. We acknowledge them. We're defining them out of scope for this report. And subsequently, they warrant deep dives or whatever. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: You said it all. 

SASHA STASHWICK: And I think that will allow us to just have more—to increase the potential of our report to have influence. 

ARUN MAJUMDAR: No, I agree. 

SHARON NOLEN: I'm seeing some nods around the room on that. So, I think I heard consensus for the first six being included. Is there any one below that, starting with other nonferrous materials? Are there any below that one and below that people would argue to include, or could they all be included in some way, as Sasha had mentioned, as outside the scope, but something we acknowledge, something that might require a more detailed look later? 

CATHY CHOI: Mining—I don't know if I would even vote for including it as an acknowledgment. If we're talking about greenhouse gas, over 50% at a mine site is from the vehicles. So, impact-wise, I don't know if acknowledging it is impactful, but yeah—that's my opinion. 

SASHA STASHWICK: That's what [inaudible] say about the greenhouse gases from the top one, two, three, four, five, six. What percentage of the total sector-wide emissions do those account for? Are we capturing 90% of emissions by looking at those? 

JAMES HAUG: I think it was included the finding on there. You're probably looking at 70% to 80% or so, with 80%— 

SASHA STASHWICK: Capture 3/4. We could say we're capturing 3/4 of it. 

JAMES HAUG: I think just to the point about the circular economy, mining, and primary, if you are looking at that whole supply chain value chain, you could make some comments, a full accounting of the embodied carbon tracks back to primary— 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: The mined materials? 

JAMES HAUG: —mined materials. And it's a really interesting point about, for example, the omissions that you account for from, for example, the industrial sector. So, EIA, the Energy Information Administration, counts off-road vehicles or mine, construction, and others as part of the industrial emissions—farming. 

Inside of the ERE, there's been a pushover with the Transportation Deputy Assistant Secretary to say those are transportation. We want to count all transportation, things that are vehicles, because they all look alike. So even inside of DOE, there's a little bit of an interplay of those things. 

And one can say, technologies that are being invested in by other parts of DOE should have a knock-on effect to those emissions that are attributable to mining. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Mined materials. So, there's mining. When I think of mining, I think of the actual action of mining. Then there's what you're saying, the mined materials that go through a lot of state—there's some processing at the mine site. And then it goes on to other places. So, I can see that. 

SUNDAY ABRAHAM: [inaudible] as well, [inaudible] not just transportation. But with mining, you can have positive methane that is released into the atmosphere. 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Right. I'm just saying, from the whole life cycle of the mind material. And there's already a lot of attention at the mine site because over 50% of the greenhouse gas is from vehicles. And that's why the BTO has a lot of attention on. 

SHARON NOLEN: Abigail, are you going to talk on this subject or something else? 

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Yeah, I guess related to this, one thing I wanted to just clarify—I just saw there's a slight difference between the sectors on the outline and the sectors listed here. So just wanted to clarify what the correct list is with the group.  And, so, it seems like refining is one, I think, big one because, at least emissions-wise, whether that's included or not will make a big difference on whether we hit how much emissions we're capturing. 

So, it's not listed here. It is listed in the outline. And, for example, in the liftoff reports, chemicals and refining were taken together because a lot of those are tied. So, just curious from the subcommittee—just like a clarification there. And then pulp and paper also is not in the report outline, but does appear here. So, it sounds like it is one of the selected. 

JOE POWELL: And this is the third, Joe. I do have to go give a talk here in a moment, but yeah, refining and chemicals are also often grouped. And be happy to take that on, if people think it—in scope. But some of that does overlap with the chemical sector. Some of it has its own uniqueness. And looks like may need to bring in some other players, given all of the things I'm signing up for here. But I think that is a big deal to consider because if you consider the scope 3 emissions in refining, it's the biggest in the economy. 

SHARON NOLEN: So, I'm going to try to say where I think we're headed. And you can disagree if you want to disagree. So, what I would suggest is that we take the top six that are on this list. 

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