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The bulk materials in 2050 with Absolute Zero emissions
25 May 2022 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
The ‘Blue Skies, Green Future’ webinar series is presented by Transforming Foundation Industries Network+ and presents ideas and innovation to spark discussion on the topic of transformation and sustainability within the foundation industries.
The bulk materials in 2050 with Absolute Zero emissions
Most discussion of mitigation to date has focused on new energy infrastructure technologies – in particular carbon capture and storage, hydrogen as an energy vector and options for removing emissions from the atmosphere. However, deployment rates are so slow that it is now certain that none of these ideas will be significant by 2030, and they are very unlikely to be contributing at a significant scale for subsequent emissions reduction target dates. The critical consequence for the supply-chains of the foundation industries, is that we must expect to be operating in 2050 with no cement and no blast-furnace steel, with steel and glass supplied only by recycling, and with plastics made only in electric processes.
Realistically, this means a drastic reduction in the supply of bulk materials. In facing up to this legally mandated reduction, the talk will aim to anticipate the resulting growth opportunities – for new businesses that optimise material use, electrify the whole material supply chain, extend material value over the longest feasible time, and lead to the highest quality all-electric processing for end-of-life materials.
Speaker profile
Julian Allwood is Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge. He worked for 10 years for Alcoa on flat rolling, before academic positions at Imperial College and Cambridge. His research group develops new manufacturing technologies for metals and strategies to mitigate climate change. From 2009-13 he held an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, to explore Material Efficiency as a climate mitigation strategy – delivering material services with less new material. This led to publication in 2012 of the book “Sustainable Materials: with both eyes open” which can be read online at www.withbotheyesopen.com and was listed by Bill Gates as “one of the best six books I read in 2015.”
Julian was a Lead Author of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a focus on mitigating industrial emissions. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Materials, Minerals and Mining, a Fellow of the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP) and served as chairman of its metal forming section, a member of the UK’s Energy Research Partnership and for ten years was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017 and in 2021 was awarded the triennial Japan Society for Technology of Plasticity International Prize for Research and Development in Precision Forging.
From 2019-24 he is director of UK FIRES – a £5m industry and multi-university programme aiming to explore all aspects of Industrial Strategy compatible with delivering zero emissions by 2050. ‘Absolute Zero’, the first publication of UK FIRES attracted widespread attention including a full debate in the House of Lords in Feb 2020, and has led to a string of other reports, research and impact.
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