Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee First Meeting – Day 1 Text Version (2024)

Below is a transcription of Day 1 of the Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee's First Meeting, which was held on March 21, 2024, by the U.S. Department of Energy. See Day 2.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Good morning. Good morning everybody. I'm very excited to have everyone here for the first meeting of the Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee. Before we go any further, we will … This meeting is being recorded. So, we're going to have a brief message alerting everyone to that.

SIMONE: Yes, good morning. This Zoom call, including all audio and images of participants and presentation materials, may be recorded, saved, edited, distributed, used internally, posted on DOE's website, or otherwise made publicly available. If you continue to access this call 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. Thank you.

ZACH PRITCHARD: OK. Thank you very much, Simone. So, a couple housekeeping things before we dive in. This meeting is being held consistent with Federal Advisory Committee Act requirements, which means that it is open to the public to stream online. The meeting recording minutes and transcript along with all presentations and written material provided to the members will be posted to the DOE committee web page. So, as described in the federal register notice, members of the public need to register in advance to provide oral statements. Since we did not receive any requests to provide oral statements, the public comment period is going to be removed from the end of the agenda and the audience will not have the ability to unmute during the presentation or participate in the Zoom chat. That doesn't mean that the public cannot submit comments to the committee. We are still happy to receive written statements from folks, so you can send a written statement to the committee's email address ITIAC@ee.doe.gov and just put it in the subject line that you are sending in a written statement for the first meeting.

So, I'll remind the committee at breaks, but we'll just say up at the top, committee members, you are not permitted to discuss committee business as a group during breaks, during lunch, or anywhere outside of committee meetings. This is a requirement of federal advisory committees. If a quorum of you are together, then it's a meeting and it needs to be open to the public with certain limited exceptions. So, just a reminder on that.

For everybody in the room, just for your awareness, the room microphones are extremely sensitive, so shuffling papers, whispering to the person next to you, that kind of stuff might get picked up. One thing that will help with this is for members to make sure you use the microphone in front of you. So, there's a little button there. It'll turn red when it's activated. Talk clearly into your microphone and that kind of overrides all the background noise. But, yeah, still try to keep the shuffling to a minimum. With that, I think I will hand it over to our esteemed chair, Sharon Nolen.

SHARON NOLEN: Good morning. I'd like to welcome everyone to the committee meeting. I've been looking forward to meeting everyone in person. I'd like to say I've had the privilege of being involved with Department of Energy since 2010. So, 14 years I've worked with them on the Better Plants program. And if you're not familiar with that, I'd be glad to share about it. But I'll just say, today, it's a partnership between industry and the Department of Energy. And it's been a very good relationship. So, I hope that our committee will have the same sort of partnership that I've seen in the Better Plants program. When I think about … When I saw that this committee was being formed, it was something I instantly wanted to be involved in. Through my time working with the Department of Energy, I developed a lot of respect for the people, the institution, and the work that they do. And so, it was an easy decision to say that I want to be part of this committee. I hope all of you are as honored and eager to get started as I am.

So, when we think about what we're facing here, climate change, I don't think I have to convince anyone in this room that climate change is a global problem facing our world today. And I think that we have the opportunity to address that in a way that really has not been available to us before. It's really important to have the partnership between industry and the Department of Energy. During my time working with DOE, I've seen that they are very eager to learn the industrial perspective, which I think speaks highly of people who want to not just see their own perspective but also to learn. And obviously, industry has benefited from this partnership as well. So, I look forward to working with the committee. I want to welcome all of you today to our first in-person meeting.

With that, let me just talk a little bit about the agenda. So, in general, today, we will be looking at all the work being done by the Department of Energy that is applicable to our committee. So, we're going to have a number of presentations. Just in high level, we'll be hearing about the innovation pipeline for industrial decarbonization, the industrial decarbonization strategy, the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office, and then we'll have a number of lightning talks addressing different areas, and then end up the day with demo and deployment lightning talks and Q&A. So, we do encourage you to be involved throughout the day. Ask questions. Provide comments. We don't want this just to be a series of presentations; we'd like for it to be a discussion.

OK. With that, I'd like to introduce the committee members, and I think we have a slide with everyone's picture. There we are. OK. I'll start. We do want to keep this fairly short because we know everyone has a very lengthy bio or you probably wouldn't be here today. So, what we're going to do is just say our name, organization title, and then one sentence about something you've worked on in the past year that's going to have an impact on industrial decarbonization.

So, I'll start. Sharon Nolen. I'm with Eastman Chemical Company. My title is program manager and an Eastman fellow of our Global Natural Resource Management Program. And the thing I've been most excited about in the last year is an optimization program that we're developing for a decarbonization strategy so that we can really come up with the best solution thinking about a number of different variables.

With that, we will start here with Cathy and just go around the room.

CATHY CHOI: My name is Cathy Choi. I am the chief sustainability officer at ClearFlame Engine Technologies. It's a startup. Prior though, I've got 17 years with Caterpillar and about 6 years with Cummins. What we're working on from a decarbonization standpoint are low-carbon fuels associated with alcohol in an internal combustion engine as a bridge to net zero. The other areas that I'm working from the last year is being able to have the functional adders so we have not only the technology but something that also delights in terms of the performance of whatever the powertrain is. Thank you.

SUE CLARK: Hello, everyone. I'm Sue Clark from the Savannah River National Lab where I'm the chief research officer there. And at SRNL, we're working on multiple sources of clean energy ranging from hydrogen to solar to nuclear and really trying to think about the grid of the future that will enable much more integration across these different energy sources.

SUBODH DAS: Good morning. My name is Subohd Das. I'm the CEO of Phinix, LLC. Most of my background has been working with industry and academia. And I have worked on many DOE projects over 20 some years. Most of my recent activities has been upscaling or recycling the products that normally is not used for its proper application or being exported or being, worst case, landfill. So, if we can recycle everything that comes to this country, I think we're much better off.

BETSY DUTROW: Hi, I'm Betsy Dutrow. My title is team leader. I lead the Energy Star® Industrial team at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This past year, we've had the pleasure of having good support for our programs as we're rolling out new efforts to reach what I consider to be more general industry. We've done a lot of work with energy intensives, and we've been doing quite a bit to form local networks where we're going to reach manufacturers on a more local level to help them with energy efficiency. So, that's been exciting.

ANNA FENDLEY: Good morning, everyone. Anna Fendley. I'm the director for regulatory and state policy at the United Steelworkers Union. The short name of the union is Steelworkers, but we actually represent workers in just about all of the energy-intensive hard-to-abate sectors. And I think the most important thing that I've been doing in the past year is working to build labor management partnerships around these issues and the future of industry and really try to develop some authentic conversations about what needs to happen.

NEAL ELLIOTT: And I'm Neal Elliott. I am director emeritus at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, probably more familiarly known ACEEE. And I have been working over the last 3 years on electrification industrial process heating and the associated market—excuse me—market and infrastructure challenges that massive electrification in the industrial sector poses.

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, let's [INAUDIBLE].

COMAS HAYNES: Hello. My name is Comas Haynes. I am a faculty member within the Georgia Tech Research Institute. I'm also the Hydrogen Initiative lead within Georgia Tech. Really, this past year and a little further back, I've been working in two key areas. I think they relate to this regarding decarbonization. One is we're one of five—Georgia Tech is one of five universities standing up in Industrial Assessment Center—the Center of Excellence, which is … I won't go into all the background of it, but it's kind of a scaled-up version of the IEC program but with a lot of added emphasis regarding decarbonization especially within the manufacturing sectors. And on a deeper dive, I also am involved with high temp—thermal management of high temperature electrolysers and fuel cells. And in particular, that gives us more efficiency opportunity with hydrogen, which is of course, a decarbonized fuel.

ERIC MASANET: Good morning, everyone. My name is Eric Masanet. I'm a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I've been involved in industrial decarbonization for about 20 years. I started my career working—research career working with Betsy at Energy Star, and then with Joe, and quite a few of you in the room. And what we've been working on recently in my lab is trying to really drill down to understand how we move the needle on industrial electrification. So, we have students working on integrating datasets and developing models to really shine a light on which plants, which locations can we electrify first at the lowest cost and bring the greatest benefits to environmental justice. And sort of a secondary goal in that, it's actually quite an important one, is training the students, the next generation of analysts. So, people that can work in strategy at companies. Work in technology assistance. We have too few trained professionals who understand the industrial sector at a granular level and who can do the analysis and forward looking roadmaps to point and shine a light on where we need to go, basically. So, we're trying to make a lot of headway in that as well.

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Morning, everyone. Abigail Regitsky with Breakthrough Energy. I'm a senior manager in our U.S. Policy and Advocacy team and lead our industrial decarbonization work there. On the policy side of things, I'd say something that we've been working on is really bringing together partners, civil society, as well as companies to really take advantage of all of the funding opportunities that are now available for this sector thanks to Congress and to DOE for the excellent implementation. And so, I think we've seen exciting announcements already on several projects, and I think we're awaiting to hear more soon. And so it's very exciting to be in this space and to have all this opportunity now.

JEFF RISSMAN: Thank you. Hi. I'm Jeff Rissman, and I'm the senior director of the industry program at Energy Innovation, which is a clean energy and climate technology and policy nonpartisan think tank. So, I've been working on a number of projects, but in the past year, the most exciting one is probably the release of my book, Zero-Carbon Industry, Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity. It just came out from Columbia University press a few weeks ago and aims to be this really comprehensive resource to talk about what are the technologies that can cut industrial emissions and transition to clean industry, and then what policies could help them get commercialized and deployed at scale.

AKSHAY SAHNI: Hi. I'm Akshay Sahni. 26 years with Chevron, the last 3 years with our venture capital group. And in that capacity, we work with the external innovation ecosystem, startup companies, universities, national labs, and the DOE in areas such as carbon capture utilization and storage low-carbon-intensity hydrogen renewable fuels, as well as low-carbon power and heat.

SASHA STASHWICK: Hi. I'm Sasha Stashwick. I'm the director of policy at Carbon180. We are a carbon-removal-focused NGO, and I look after the technology portfolio, so technologies like direct air capture, most notably. And prior to that, I was the industrial policy director at NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council. I think two things of note: I'm thinking a lot about successful first of a kind commercial scale deployments to really de-risk some of these key emerging technologies. And then thinking a lot about: What is the package of policies, both the supply side policies and the demand side policies, that we want to bring to bear in these sectors?

SRIDHAR SEETHARAMAN: Thank you. I'm Sridhar Seetharaman from Arizona State University. I'm also the CEO of EPIXC, which is the seventh Clean Energy Manufacturing Innovation Institute focused on industrial decarbonization through electrification of industrial process heat. I'm also the chief science officer for the Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. My background: I'm basically just an iron and steel maker. So, most of my career I've worked on industrial energy efficiency and decarbonization and recycling of iron and steel. Thanks.

SHARON NOLEN: Yeah. We certainly appreciate everybody taking the time to be here today. We know we didn't have a lot of notice. We do have two people who were unable to attend but are on the line, so we want to go to them next for introductions. So, Arun, are you there? Can you introduce yourself?

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Can you hear me?

SHARON NOLEN: Yes.

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Good. My name is Arun Majumdar. I'm a professor at Stanford University, also the dean of the Doerr School of Sustainability. About 15 years ago, I was in DOE as the first director of ARPA-E and also the acting Undersecretary of Energy, and spent some time in the private sector at Google. And currently, I chair the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board. I'm delighted to be here.

SHARON NOLEN: Thank you. And Jolene?

JOLENE SHEIL: Hi, my name is Jolene Sheil. I'm the portfolio manager for the Focus on Energy Program in Wisconsin, which is the statewide energy efficiency program. We have a program specifically for large industrial customers, kind of energy-intensive industries—pulp and paper, metal casting, food processing, etc. And we're looking forward to what we can see in terms of technologies that can further help these companies reduce their energy use, and therefore, their emissions of carbon. Thank you.

SHARON NOLEN: OK. And we do have one last member who was unable to join us today. That is Joe Powell. He is a principal advisor at ChemePD LLC in Richmond, Texas. He's a process development engineer for multiple industry projects in clean energy, chemical, hydrogen, and ammonia. Before joining his current company, he had a 30-year tenure as chief scientist for Shell's Chemical Engineering Department.

So, with that, let me turn it over to Zach, who's going to help us meet the ITIAC staff. Yeah.

[CHUCKLES]

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yeah. Thanks, Sharon. And that is how we say the acronym, at least. [CHUCKLES] ITIAC sounds a little derogatory maybe, but it's the best way we found. So, Zach Pritchard. I am the incoming designated federal officer for the committee. Our esteemed former or, I guess, still current DFO, Emmeline Kao, is on the line, and we'll hear from her in a second. But we're in the process of transitioning from her over to me, and much as it—I think you all know—took quite a long time for all of your membership packages to go through, we have to go through some of the same approval processes to switch over the DFO. So, I am in the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office here at DOE, have been with the office for about 2.5 years. The first two of that was as a EEE Science and Technology policy fellow. And have been a federal employee with the program for about 6 months. I think next we will maybe hear from Avi and then Joe, and then I'll introduce some of the other staff around the room. Thanks, Zach, and thanks to all of you for coming.

AVI SHULTZ: [COUGHS.] Excuse me. You'll hear a bit more from me today. So, I'll be quick right now just to quickly introduce myself. I'm Avi Shultz. I'm the director of the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. I've been here at DOE for about 10 years, most of that time with the Solar Energy Technologies Office, but came over to join IEDO, the Industrial Efficiency Decarbonization Office, just as soon it was as was created in October of 2022, first as the deputy director and then, as of last summer, the first appointed director of IEDO. And before I hand it over, let me just take a quick second. Zach said … Let me just thank him and Emmeline who are on the line for all that they've done to work through all of the process to get you all here today and to kick off this really, really exciting committee that we're going to be—that's going to be a huge part of our program going forward. So, thank you. Thank you, Zach and Emmeline.

JOE CRESKO: Thank you. Joe Cresko. I'm the chief engineer in IEDO. Sorry. It didn't stick on. Hi. I'm Joe Cresko. I'm the chief engineer in IEDO. I've been at DOE since about 2008. I also started as a AAAS fellow. I made my way through the Advanced Manufacturing Office and then transitioned to the Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. Prior to that, I ran an applied research and development center. I was a director in electro technologies. So, it's were my subject-matter expertise lies in advanced electrification for industrial processes. So, I think this is a really interesting time to get a committee together. We're looking at new technologies, ways to drive forward on this. And you're going to hear a lot about some of that today. We'll give you some background and perspective. I lead strategic analysis for the office, so a lot of the products you'll see that we—products, work that we put out there, analytical products, and reports is informed by a lot of the analysis that we have a team that works on inside the office and includes a number of members from our national labs and experts from some other organizations. So, just with that, I'll turn it back to you, Zach.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yep. Great. Thank you. And sorry. I'll apologize to folks who are watching the recording. We are not able to actively move the cameras around. So, today, the focus will be on the podium because most of the agenda will be presenters. Tomorrow, we'll be able to look at the committee. So, sorry that this is not the best viewing experience right now. I will introduce over here to the—on this side of the room, Selena Harris.

Selena is a new technology manager in IEDO. A part of the cross sector technology sub program that you'll hear about later today. And she has been—she has some history supporting federal advisory committees coming into our program, so we've been very lucky to have her on this team since she joined the office. And then on the other side of the room, over here, we have some of our contractor staff who have been really essential to making this effort happen. We have Caroline Dollinger, who I'm sure all of you have gotten many emails from, has been, again, really critical to getting this meeting on the books and getting everything set up for it. Next to her, we have Cameron Bordenay who will be helping with running the meeting today and taking notes. And then next to Cameron, we have Pamela de Los Reyes, who, believe it or not, from the conception of this committee to today, we have had three different federal employees who were leading the effort. But Pamela has been involved since the very beginning, so is the person here who has had the longest tenure working on ITIAC. So, very grateful for her help as well. The other person that I want to introduce is Emmeline Kao, who is hopefully on line and will be able to speak. But Emmeline was the designated federal officer for, I believe, a couple of years and really took the committee from the point of after it was officially created on the DOE books through the process of getting all of our wonderful members appointed and starting the process of planning for this meeting. So, again, someone else without whom we would not be here today, and I think many of you have also spoken to her as your appointment process went through. So, Emmeline, just if you want to say anything, yeah, happy to hear from you as well.

EMMELINE KAO: OK. Thanks, Zach. Can everyone hear me OK?

ZACH PRITCHARD: Maybe keep talking for a second. It felt like you got louder.

EMMELINE KAO: OK. Well, apologies for my outdated wintery background now that it's officially spring. But as Zach said, I'm Emmeline Kao. I am the now outgoing DFO for ITIAC. I'm formerly with IEDO, but have since moved over to the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, where I'll be working on deployment-level industrial decarbonization rather than the R&D-level work that IEDO undertakes. I'm sure you'll be hearing more about the Office of Manufacturing Energy Supply Chains later. But I just wanted to take this time to just express how excited I am that ITIAC is finally able to all meet throughout all the work that this whole team has been doing to stand up this committee. We are just so continually impressed with the breadth and the depth of knowledge and expertise represented among you all. Each person here has such a unique perspective to bring, and you've seen that from all the introductions that you have been doing, all the important work that you've been doing, and all the unique kind of perspective that you'll be bringing here. And I've said it so many times I feel like a broken record, but I really think there's no better collection of industry, academia, nonprofit, labor, government leaders and experts to take on this really important work. And so, it's really just been such an incredible privilege and honor to be able to work with you all. I'm no longer the DFO, but I'm sure our paths will cross again. I'm really excited to just follow along and see the output of this incredible group of folks and the collaboration and the work that you are about to undertake. So, thanks for letting me join. And it's really just such an honor to see this group stand up and to meet each other and to start this work.

ZACH PRITCHARD: OK. Thanks so much, Emmeline. And I am going to move from my seat at the table up to the podium. So, I will see everyone in 30 seconds.

All right. Thank you very much. And we are miraculously running ahead of schedule. I think we budgeted a lot of time for introductions. And, you know, people might be gung ho to go over there once in its limit, but you all did an excellent job on that.

So, we'll have plenty of time here to talk about what the committee exists to do and to also introduce some of the tools that we're going to be using to help facilitate this meeting because we do have 17 members who are going to be participating today and tomorrow. And yeah. We want to make sure we hear input from everybody, even if there's not time for you to speak at every point what you want to speak.

So, if you can go to the next slide, please.

So, yeah, why are we here today? The ITIAC committee was directed to be created by Congress as part of the Energy Act of 2020. So, within the Energy Act, there are two pieces that are basically relevant to the committee. I believe you might have some of this language already in your packet, or we will add it tomorrow if it's not already there. But essentially, Congress directed DOE to do work to reduce emissions from the industrial sector. And along with that, they directed DOE to create an advisory committee to advise us on this broad portfolio of work. And there is a lot of very specific legal language in there on things that the committee is being asked to address. There's also a lot of flexibility in there, I think, for the committee to work on the pieces that they think are important and to really shape how the final outputs of your work come together.

So, if we go to the next slide, it digs into the details of some of this. And I apologize. The way the room is set up, I cannot see the slides unless I physically turn to the TVs. [CHUCKLES]

But s, like I said, the committee was created to advise DOE on research, development, demonstration, and commercial application activities related to industrial emissions reduction technologies. So, within that kind of high-level charge, there are a number of specific things that the committee has asked to do to propose goals and objectives for this program, to evaluate technologies within focus areas—and we'll talk about those focus areas in a second—to develop a strategic plan for DOE to work in this space to evaluate DOE's current activities as of now, but then, as the committee continues, to work to evaluate how DOE is using the committee's advice on future programs, and then also to produce regular reports that kind of pull all of this together. So, this—the report is the thing that the committee will be primarily working towards over the next year, 2 years.

We'll discuss tomorrow what the timeline for this looks like, and the committee is then directed to produce a new report every 3 years. So, after this first one, there's kind of a longer period to continue working on this effort. Because the committee is created in statute, the committee currently exists indefinitely and will continue producing these reports advising yearly on this program until, if, for some reason, Congress told us not to do it anymore.

So, let's dive in a little bit onto the focus areas because I think this is the meat of what—of the specifics that Congress put in. And this is still a summary level. Tomorrow, there's a more detailed presentation we'll go into that really has all of the exact text and direction from Congress. So, I didn't think about the fact that I wouldn't be clicking when I made these all up here, one by one, but maybe as I talk through, you can advance.

So, the first major area is industrial materials production processes. And a number of industries are called out specifically there, areas that a lot of you have expertise in, so, metals industries, iron, steel, steel mill products, aluminum, glass, cement. Pulp and paper industry and ceramics are also all specifically called out. And well, not in this bullet, the chemical sector is also called out, generally, and also with regard to sustainable chemistry research.

So, the next major area here, medium- and high-temperature heat. As you'll hear some about today and as I think many of you are aware, this is a major source of emissions in the industrial sector and one of the big challenges that we're facing. Congress calls out a couple specific technology areas to decarbonize: heat, electrification, renewable heat, CHP, and alternative fuels for the committee to consider As I just mentioned, sustainable chemistry is called out specifically, and that is part of a broader directive to look at the chemical sector. Congress also asks us to look at smart and digital manufacturing technologies. As well as modeling and advanced data analytics. So, kind of a cross-cutting area that applies to many industries as well as several of these later ones will be cross-cutting across industries.

So, the next one, sustainability and material efficiency: energy efficiency technologies, alternative materials with fewer life cycle emissions. And there are some specific examples called out in the legislation in that area as well that we can talk about: development of net-zero emissions liquid and gaseous fuels, emissions reduction in heavy transportation—so shipping, aviation, long distance—then carbon capture technologies for industrial processes, and finally, high-performance computing and modeling to develop advanced materials and processes. So, as I said a couple times, this is—this still very broad list is condensed down from what is in the legislation. But just to give you a flavor of the wide variety of topics and technologies that Congress is looking for the committee to offer insight on and to advise the program on.

Thank you. So, again, only two slides on this today because the way that we have worked with Sharon on this agenda is—today, is going to be mainly focused on getting an overview of all of DOE's work in this space, kind of catching you up on what DOE she is doing, what resources are already available. And then tomorrow is pretty free form. That will be time in the morning when the committee can really think through how they want to approach the tasks that they've been given. And to facilitate that, we will talk in much more depth tomorrow about specifically what Congress is asking for. So, that said, let me pause here knowing we'll talk in more depth tomorrow. But if folks have questions about what was already up there …

If you have questions about what you're allowed to do as a federal advisory committee, any of those kinds of things, happy to address that.

SUE CLARK: So, I can start. Just a general question about boundaries and swim lanes and thinking about what the nation needs in terms of decarbonization … There's, of course, what DOE does, but DOE is not the only entity that does this, tries to encourage this. So, is there an opportunity to think about whole of government or do we need to stay focused only on DOE?

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, in creating the committee, Congress directed the committee to focus specifically on the DOE program. That said, definitely, you're encouraged, I think, to think in context of the governmentwide efforts. And so, that's why Betsy is here today from EPA. We are asked to have members from relevant government agencies, and we also are asked to coordinate with the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, which gives a little of that cross-government view as well. Eric.

ERIC MASANET: I just have a quick question regarding the high-performance computing component. So, is it within the purview of this committee also to consider … ? Clearly the application of those methods to improving industrial processes seems within the scope, but how about the energy used in manufacturing of the chips, the servers, that's becoming a really hot topic lately? Is that also part of the purview looking at data centers, AI, HPC, as its own sector in the same kind of perspectives as we're looking at steel or pulp and paper?

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yeah. So, that is not specifically within the direction that Congress gave. However, that does not mean that it's not something that the committee could focus on. One of the directives in the legislation is essentially that the committee can add focus areas or remove focus areas that it thinks are important or aren't important. So, I think that is … Yeah. We'll hear more from DOE folks today, but it's definitely an area that DOE is thinking about and is aware of as an area of concern in the future and potentially a significant source of new emissions from industry.

Eric again. Yeah.

ERIC MASANET: Maybe just one more. I'm sorry. In terms of the advice we give, are we able to advise or recommend specific policies or is our job—I mean, maybe this will come out tomorrow—more about technologies and deployments and types of programs rather than specific policy recommendations? Like for example, “You should fund X.”

ZACH PRITCHARD: So, the legislation, I would say, is not very prescriptive about that. Certainly, there is … Basically, the committee is asked to evaluate barriers and technology gaps related to these areas. So, I think there is room for the committee to focus on things that they think are important. That said, my suggestion would be, given that the committee is primarily advising DOE, that the committee focuses on things that are within DOE's purview rather than broader policy. But I will say that is just my suggestion, and I am here to facilitate all of your work on this effort. So, really, you are the decision makers here, and I'm here to help.

OK. So, the way that we will handle things today, and maybe I should have said part of this before I started taking questions, but as we go into presentations later today, I'm anticipating that there could be a lot of questions. Maybe we'll ask folks to use their name tags to indicate if they want to ask a question, so you don't have to leave your hand up forever. So, if you just rotate it from horizontal up to vertically, then the moderators will keep an eye on that and will keep an eye on the order of people to call on. We also … As I noted, because the camera is looking at me or whoever the presenter is and not out of the room and we will be producing a transcript of this meeting, It'll be helpful if you say your name before you start talking, assuming the moderator hasn't said your name when they call on you. And that will just help make those people's lives much easier so they're not trying to figure out who the 20 different voices belong to. The other logistical item on how we're going to facilitate this meeting is that we have set up a—I don't know if folks are familiar with Murial as a platform. We have set up a Murial board so that folks can add input throughout the day in addition to the established Q&A periods. But if there's questions that we don't have time to get to, if there are things that pop up in your mind that you want to talk about tomorrow but aren't questions directly for the presenter, this is space for you to keep track of all of those things, and we will use that to facilitate the discussion tomorrow. So, in your packet in front of you, there should be a QR code for the day one Murial board, if you want to do it on your phone. If you have your laptop, I believe we have sent or will send an email with the link to all of you so that you can open it up on your laptop. This is an area where I will thank, again, Selena who did a great job setting all this up and who is the—I will call her the Murial expert among us. So, let's take a couple minutes for folks to get connected on there. And then play around with it, see if you understand how it works, and we can address questions before we move on. But just want to make sure everybody is comfortable using it. And to be clear to anyone listening, this is only—this platform is only available to members of the committee. We will not be accepting public comment or input through the Murial platform. Maybe … Yeah. Selena, if you turn on your mic and just say what you're saying to Sue about how to add.

SELENA: Yes. So. if you double click, that should make a new sticky note. There's a key at the top of the board on some color options that can help keep track of things. So, if you're taking a direct note on what someone's saying, I've indicated that would be good to have in the tone that they're calling emerald. If you have questions, add those in blue. And then anything that you put in the missed color, I'll take over to the second day discussion board. So, those are things that you want us to bring up tomorrow. So, you'll see those again tomorrow. Throughout the day, I'll be able to basically summon people. So, if all of a sudden, your screen changes to a view, that means that you're seeing then what I'm seeing. So, as we go through the different things, I'll zoom into different pieces to help people follow the agenda. But I will release you after that. So, if you want to move around freely, you can. And yeah. And if you have any questions on this side, I'm right behind you. On that side, there's a team right behind you that can message me to come over for help. And if you're in the middle—it's mostly just Sharon. So, you can ask Zach. [CHUCKLES] And if folks online have questions, you can respond to the email that went out this morning, and we will get them answered.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yep. Perfect. And I will also just say there is—the Murial boards are both pretty structured, so if you feel like you are connecting with the Murial platform in your heart, then absolutely, work within that structure, use all the colors and everything. We also will go through and clean things up and help get things to the right place if you just want to put sticky notes wherever. We don't want it to be like a burden to use this platform but just something that can be helpful. Yeah. The other thing I'll note is that everything in here on Day 1, and then from Day 2, we’ll take and kind of process to fix typos, expand out acronyms, all that kind of stuff, and turn it into more of like a Word document or report form so that it can be posted online for the public to see. So, we are, like I said, running a couple of minutes ahead of schedule. So, I think what would make sense to do is to pause for 10-minute break here for folks to make sure they're connected on the platform, feel comfortable with it. If you need to go get some water, go to the restroom, and then we will reconvene at 10 a.m. to move with the rest—move forward with the rest of our agenda. All right? Thank you.

[BREAK]

ZACH PRITCHARD: —in this block of speakers, we'll be discussing the innovation pipeline for industrial decarbonization. So, come on up, Avi. And Avi is also one of the speakers, so double duty.

AVI SHULTZ: And of course, I need to adjust the height of the microphone from Zach to me. [CHUCKLES] And you have to adjust your sightlines as well. So, thank you, Zach. Again, I really want to thank Zack again as well as Emmeline for all the work that they've done to get us to where we are today.

Originally, I was, of course, just supposed to be moderating this session. Unfortunately, we had a last-minute cancelation. My boss, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Buildings and Industry Carolyn Snyder, was supposed to talk. She was very excited to come here today. Unfortunately, just had some last minute unavoidable health issues that prevented her from coming in person today. I think she's, conditions permitting, going to try to join as much as she can remotely. But I know she's very, very, very apologetic she wasn't able to come here today. But I'm here instead too. So, you'll be hearing even a bit more from me today than was originally on the agenda.

But I'm very happy to start out this session by talking a little bit about the innovation pipeline for DOE today. So, first, welcome to the Department of Energy. Welcome to the committee. It is often gathered around—when we gather around tables, such as these, that we dream up ideas that become investments and investments that become game changing technologies.

I am very, very excited that we're gathered around this table today because each one of you is an agent of change in your own right. I want to congratulate you on your appointment to ITIAC, and thank you for the time, energy, and brainpower that you're devoting to this federal advisory committee. In today's world, time is perhaps our most precious nonrenewable resource, and I am humbled that you're willing to devote some of yours to helping DOE decarbonize the industrial sector.

And let me emphasize just how much we need your help. Decarbonizing the industrial sector, tackling a third of the emissions across the U.S. economy is no small feat. It will require us to transform an incredibly diverse and complex sector with decades old infrastructure at an unprecedented scale and pace. If we're going to be successful, we need to work together across government, industry, academia, and American communities to fearlessly innovate our way to net zero.

The good news is that we have an unparalleled level of investment for industrial decarbonization and a solid strategic foundation to build on. Thanks to our industrial decarbonization roadmap, pathways to commercial liftoff reports, and more analysis coming soon, we're taking a close look at barriers to decarbonization and ensuring our DOE investments span every stage of the innovation pipeline, from fundamental science to applied research and development to demonstrations and full-scale deployment.

It's vital that our investments span the full innovation pipeline because the technologies that we'll need to decarbonize the industrial sector are all at different stages of maturity. While some technologies, that you'll hear about next from Arpita, that she'll talk about, are ready for deployment and commercialization in the near term, many either don't yet exist or are in very early stages of development.

To achieve full industrial decarbonization, it's important that while we advance mature technologies past final market risks, we're also aggressively pursuing fundamental science and R&D to find new technology solutions. And that's where our applied technology offices come in. Through the Technologies for Industrial Emissions Reduction Development program, or TIERD as we call it, we're identifying the most promising industrial ideas coming out of the Office of Science and leveraging the expertise of 13 applied technology offices to further the research and develop these industrial technologies.

So, how does that look in practice? DOE has developed eight bold Energy Earthshots™ focused on RD&D where we need additional breakthroughs to reach our clean energy goals. Two of these Earthshots set aggressive targets for industrial decarbonization. The first, the Industrial Heat Shot™ targets, the most emissions intensive processes common across the industrial sector: the generation and use of heat. Heat is responsible for almost half of the emissions that manufacturing creates. Our Industrial Heat Shot aims to develop cost competitive industrial heat decarbonization technologies with at least 85% lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. To get there, our applied offices are looking at solutions ranging from electrifying industrial processes to replacing fossil fuel combustion with alternative low-emissions heat sources, like clean hydrogen and solar thermal.

The second Earthshot, the Clean Fuels and Products Shot™, aims to develop cost effective fuels and products from sustainable carbon sources that will achieve at least 85% lower net emissions by 2035. These sustainable feedstocks will help the chemicals subsector break its dependence on fossil fuels, and in turn, drastically reduce emissions.

Through TIERD and these Energy Earthshot initiatives, were rallying our RD&D offices to work together to find answers to the toughest industrial questions. For example, how do we electrify process heating without putting undue pressure on a rapidly evolving electric grid? The Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office recently launched a $70 million clean energy manufacturing innovation Institute laser focused on identifying solutions for exactly that question: How do we seamlessly incorporate clean hydrogen into existing iron and steel making processes? The Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Technology Office is working closely with IEDO to find the answer. And importantly, how do we ensure the industrial workforce has the technical expertise to deploy these new best in class technologies? DOE is tackling this through tailored industrial technical assistance and workforce development programs. IEDO’s new Onsite Energy Technical Assistance Partnerships are helping manufacturers and other large energy users across the nation incorporate clean energy technologies in their facilities. You'll hear much more about our fundamental science and R&D work later today, but hopefully, this is just a helpful preview for things that we're going to dive into over the course of the day.

And as we often say at DOE, breakthrough technologies don't start on the factory floor; they start as ideas imagined by bold problem solvers, like everyone in this room today. I'm incredibly optimistic about it ITIAC and the role each of you will play in shaping DOE's strategy to envision a net-zero industrial sector and to help make that vision a reality.

Thanks for your attention. And with that, I would like to introduce our next speaker, and she'll provide an overview of DOE's Industrial Decarbonization Commercialization and Deployment Strategy. So, I'd like to welcome Arpita Bhattacharyya, senior advisor and chief climate officer for the Loan Programs Office. Arpita.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: All right. Good to see you everyone. And just want to echo the thanks for participating in this. We always would love to start more of these like advisory type boards and it's really hard. So, now that you're on board, thank you for doing this. So, I think, as Avi mentioned, I'm Arpita Bhattacharya. I'm the chief client officer in the Loan Programs Office. What that means is I work across our portfolio ensuring that we're meeting administration priorities, trying to block down barriers and ensure that we're meeting our environmental justice goals.

So, the one thing I did … Can you—? Oh, great. So, I'm coming from the private sector. I was in solar project development and project finance, and then also at a climate startup. And I had no clue what the Department of Energy did at all. I think some of you have a little bit more experience of what we do, but this graphic that Climate Tech VC put out in—it's called the Founders Guide to DOE. I think it's super helpful in showing that, at every valley of death, we have a program office to support companies and startups and research, so it's exciting to see that. And I think you're going to hear from Christopher Davis later, the chief of staff. He's always like, “I love the Department of Energy so much.” I didn't really understand it at first, but I'm like, “I love it too.” There's so much money out there now to focus on at every valley of death. So, it's very, very exciting. So, I wanted to point out a couple of things. It seems like you have an awesome agenda where you're actually going to get into the nitty gritty of what all of these offices do and the funding out there. I'll just provide a broad overview. And what I'm here to do is just sort of represent the S3 broadly.

S3 is our Undersecretary for Infrastructure. And just a quick history lesson … I'm sure some of you already know this. We used to have just one undersecretariat, two with our nuclear, but one focused on science and technology. And now we've created this whole other pillar, hired over 1,000 people to support the deployment arm. So, it's really exciting to see. And you'll see those are the offices that didn't exist last administration over here.

Loan Programs Office has been around for a while, but it's exciting to have our sister program offices come into play to get this money out. So, we're really excited about that. A couple of things that came about in this restructuring, reorganization, was that, “Great. You're sort of duplicating a lot of the capabilities in two different undersecretaries. How are we going to actually coordinate?” So, we have launched the Industrial Technologies Joint Strategy team, led by Kelly Visconti, who's one of the gems of the agency. I think you'll probably hear from her later. So, it's great to have her as a point of being able to coordinate a lot of the work the roadmap is doing as well as thinking through all the recommendations we have in this pathways to industrial decarbonization commercial liftoff report.

So, if you haven't seen that, obviously, a great place to start to get a sense of what we see as some of the gaps in the private sector. I also just want to talk about really the posture, I think, our undersecretary of infrastructure has taken. We really say this a lot, but it's basically private sector led, government enabled. We're really here to be a catalyst and help get the deployment arm moving. But then, we actually need private sector investment.

I think we've estimated we're going to need like $300 billion of incremental investment per year by the private sector on top of the money that we're putting in. I think last year, we did like $140 million, but that number needs to go up. So, we're really here to take that first move whether it be on demonstration, whether it be on actual deployment once you get to the LPO phase.

So, we're really excited that we're—I think it's starting to happen, and we're going to be putting more reporting out on that actual impact, which is great. So, I will go through a couple of our offices that help in this space. And again, you're going to hear a lot more about them later on. I will start with the Office of Technology Transition. You can see it's over everything. It is a direct report to our secretary's office. Really, in this coordination role across the department, they obviously have their technology commercialization fund which can be a first step for energy commercialization for any of the technologies that are developed at the DOE labs, and really trying to move it that one step further into actual commercialization. So, we're lucky to have that resource. We then have, as you go further down the TRL line, and I love ARPA-E. I'm sure you're going to hear Avi later. I love all of our offices, but I'm sort of starting here in terms of getting us to talk about what we do further down the TRL level.

So, the Office of Manufacturing and Supply Chains, that operates in late stage technology development and driving large scale deployment of new technologies. So, this team is working to take proven technology and demonstrate manufacturing at scale. So, the mask is in particular for, I think, the conversation here, there's $10 billion for the Advanced Energy Project—Advanced Energy Project Credit, what we call 48C program with the Treasury Department as a tax incentive, which supports reducing greenhouse gas reductions from industrial facilities. So, this has been one of the big IRA boons for that office.

Then move into the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, one key thing, this one is actually [INAUDIBLE] Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and is sort of a permanent office. It's actually in our budget, which is great. So, this was established to take the billions of dollars earmarked for pilot and follow on demonstrations that came from the IRA and the BIL. So, there's $6 billion for industrial demonstration and funding opportunity that I think is getting close to some announcements, but you're going to see things on low-carbon fuels, feedstocks, energy source technologies, and it'll be exciting, I think, once those come out.

And then we also obviously have our Grid Deployment Office. This is really investing in the largest investment in transmission and the grid that we've ever seen. And obviously, as we face unprecedented load growth from new industries, existing industries, it's going to be super important that we actually have a grid that supports it.

So, that takes you through those offices. And then you get to us, Loan Programs Office. Though I think a lot of you know that the IRA increased our loan authority a lot. And so we're somewhere—it depends, there's, like, wonkiness about how it's actually calculated, but it was something in the $350–$400 billion range across all technologies. To get to the point where you have proven that your technology works, we don't take will it, won't it risk, and you're ready to scale.

There's a lot of different programs. Our bread and butter has always been there's an innovation requirement. So, it has to be something that's not been demonstrated in the United States a couple of times. But we now have other authorities that allow you to waive that innovation requirement. So, for example, if you are working with a state energy financing institution, we can waive the invasion requirement. If you're working with a Tribal community, we have $20 billion that doesn't need innovation.

You do have to meet our greenhouse gas requirements for most reduction requirements for most of these programs. But there's flexibility there as well. So, that's been really exciting to see. And what I think has been cool particularly in this space is that we are seeing that the technology that's been funded either by the labs or then goes to ARPA-E is now starting to come to us saying like, hey, we're ready to demonstrate or we're ready to scale up. Which program should we use?

And that coordination has been super, super important. We've been really trying to think through, like, we should not be using grant money for people who are ready for debt financing. Debt financing is a very specific thing and you have to be ready. It's not the same thing as like raising VC money, which I think a lot of you know. But are you ready? Do you have real offtake? Do you actually have site control? All that kind of stuff.

So, it's just been interesting as we've been trying to parse out all the activities happening, making sure we're funneling people into the right programs for them. And I think one of the—I mean, I'll give a couple examples, but there's applicant confidentiality, but I think particularly in the low carbon cement space, really cool to see for example, some companies that have been supported with ARPA-E money and they're starting to actually get to the point where they're ready for us and really manufacture here in the United States, which we're really excited about.

So, it's been a good collaboration. There's obviously room for improvement. I think you all from the outside are going to be able to give us a lot more guidance on how we actually improve what we're doing, and also provide holistic, strategic, vision of how this all should work. So, just excited to hear from all of you. So, thank you.

AVI SHULTZ: Sorry. If you'd stay with us here, I think we've got a few minutes. We can take—have a little bit of a discussion, fake some Q&A on this broad picture that we're starting off with today in terms of the innovation, our research and development demonstration and deployment portfolio. So, let me pause here, see if there are any questions from the committee.

SUE CLARK: I'm Sue Clark. I'm following directions.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: OK.

SUE CLARK: How do you … ? What's the definition of ready for scale?

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: So, we recently published a blog post about this, but essentially, we just—these can be 10- to 30-year loans. So, we're really looking for evidence of being able to have offtake at that point for that length of time. Some, we do have like—there's potential ways to have conditions, precedents, at different draws depending on like for hydrogen for example, we've had so many deals come in and the offtake just keeps switching over who is actually going to take it. So, there's ways we're thinking through that. So, I think that's important. It has been demonstrated. It's been demonstrated and that we see that pathway to scale. There's also ones that again, our advanced vehicle technology manufacturing program, zero innovation requirement. So, you could just get … You don't have to … This could be done many, many times in the past, but we're here to support that because we're trying to bring onshore and reshore our supply chains for EVs. So, it just really depends on the technology.

ZACH PRITCHARD: And I'll just fight for awareness that we also have an online hand up to keep track of.

AVI SHULTZ: OK. Let's go here. And then we all [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: This [INAUDIBLE]. So any way you can provide us that info [INAUDIBLE]?

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Yeah. I think there's probably a way.

AVI SHULTZ: So, I think I'd defer to you or Pete on what's available on the demonstration deployment programs. I think in your handouts or in the folders, there's a handout on the tiered. We have a brief fact sheet on the tiered program which is the innovation-focused work under the Undersecretary of Science and Innovation. I'll also point you to—and I'll highlight this a little bit later.

One of the things we set up to have just a single clearinghouse of information on UE on industrial decarbonization technologies is just a single website energy.gov/industrial technologies that coalesces information on all of the program offices that we're going to be talking about today and just one single site. So, we also have all the separate program offices, but all that information is—yeah, it can be found in just a single spot with all of the funding opportunities, all the details on there.

AUDIENCE: Website?

AVI SHULTZ: That's a website. Yeah. We didn't include a handout on that website.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Should we go to … ? Arun, I think, had his hand up.

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Hi. Can you hear me?

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Yes.

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Can you hear me?

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Yes. We can. Good morning.

ARUN MAJUMDAR: Good morning. I have a question on just the process within the DOE and a cross between DOE and other agencies. Clearly, in the loan program, you need to coordinate with both Treasury and the White House. And it's at least traditionally been plagued with a lot of paperwork internally in DOE. And my first question is: How are you streamlining that process both internally and externally to DOE to get the capital out? And within DOE, all the various offices, are there some impedance mismatches between the processing of proposals and getting the dollars out or are there some pockets of excellence that the best practices can be copied across?

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Yeah. That's a really great question. So, I think because you all are advisory board, we can have a little bit of cone of silence on some of the things that we share. So, just on your—

AUDIENCE: Sorry. Let me just interrupt to say that this will all be shared publicly.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Oh, OK. Good to know. Well, Arun, happy to chat more later on some of the improvements that we've made with Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget we do go through once we launch. So, the way the Loan Programs Office process works is you go through the early-stage application, then you launch into due diligence, and then we get to a conditional commitment, which is when we send all of our materials to Treasury and OMB. That back and forth is continuously being improved upon. I think we've been able to shrink that timeline, and that's taken intervention both at the secretary and the deputy secretary level. So, we're keenly aware of that can be a big burden especially for time for our applicants. So, we're actively working on that piece. On the efficiency piece, I think the undersecretary’s office has done a good job particularly when we think about our FOAs and what's required and the negotiations and all of that to really think through how we actually streamline the process. Because it is hard when you have four different offices trying to get out billions and billions of dollars. And we have these advisors who are trying to work with our applicants and are like, why would GDO require this thing and then manufacturing and supply chain requires a completely different thing but around the same sort of subject? So, there is internal coordination happening on that. I think one place we are trying to improve again is a bit of that sorting of where should different technologies belong. You can imagine, it's easier to check the boxes on some of the grant funding if you're further along. But maybe then you're ready for a loan. And so we need to keep improving that process.

AVI SHULTZ: Great, thanks. And I think we got a number of questions. So, we will keep moving along. I think I saw Sharon's name tag go up first.

SHARON: Yeah, you mentioned $300 billion per year needed from industrial investments in addition to the DOE money. So, I just wondered if you had any breakdown of that by year or by industry that's just a number I haven't heard. I'm very intrigued to learn more about that.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: Yes. Happy to share. And that's actually not just industrial. It's for all climate funding. So, that's one thing to clarify. And happy to get those numbers. I think those came out through our [INAUDIBLE] policy and undersecretary's office. And the idea, I think, is that especially when we're talking about the greenhouse gas emissions that we want to put out with every single dollar, I think it's a calculation based off of that. So, I don't think it's broken down by sector, but happy to follow up on that.

AVI SHULTZ: I didn't keep track of who was next, so I'll just start over on this side. Akshay?

AKSHAY SAHNI: Hi. This is Akshay Sahni. And great summary of the DOE programs. For these programs to be successful, you do need strong partnerships with the industry both the incumbent industry and the startups. From your experience over the last few years, what are the top two or three things that are working well for that partnership and where do you see the opportunities—the top two or three opportunities so that the partnership could be even stronger?

AVI SHULTZ: Maybe I can start with that from the RD&D side, the side from the applied technical offices. One thing that we've seen that works really, really well is the requirement of partnerships. So, almost all of our research programs are executed through interdisciplinary teams that typically involve laboratories, national laboratories, universities, private industry. And in fact, we on the innovation side, we typically have a fairly strict requirement about including industrial partners as part of those programs. And that has not been a deterrent to applications. We are heavily oversubscribed in our research programs when we put out funding calls. And we see that partnership. It's a really, really productive partnership that you get the innovation. You get the new ideas coming from the laboratories, from universities, from the academic researchers. And you get the realism. You get the techno-economic analysis. You get the business models developed in partnership with that. So, that's the first thing I would point to is that it's been a huge model of success in our programs.

AKSHAY SAHNI: And the opportunities? What can be better?

AVI SHULTZ: The opportunities … I would say the opportunities is one of the challenges for us—is still … While we've made huge strides in minimizing the valleys of death, there's just the scale of investment that's needed and scaling technologies up from those initial laboratory phases and even pilot-scale phases and kind of within our office. And we'll talk about this later today. Most of our programs max out or most of our research programs max out at a $10 million per project level. And that's a huge help. And that really helps advancing those technologies. But getting it from that level to when the demonstration deployment offices are ready for, that can still be a pretty significant technical gap. And the scale of funding that we just have available to us right now isn't always consistent with being able to fully de-risk all of those technologies to that large commercial demonstration level.

AKSHAY SAHNI: Thank you.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: I think the one thing I would add and, just taking low-carbon cement as an example, in thinking about who's going to be the offtaker for that, one example is the federal government is probably, I think, the biggest user of cement. You all know that. So, how do we actually do that coordination? And so, I think that's a really interesting place for all of these to be like, “Who should be bringing everyone to the table?” We give out money. Like, that's not generally the role we're going to play in the Loan Programs Office or from the S3 side. Like, “Hey, like this matchmaking piece, we can't do that.” So, it's just an interesting thing that I think would love this whole group's brain on and how you actually coordinate that.

AVI SHULTZ: I'll keep moving on to Abigail.

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Thanks. It's really encouraging to hear that on the coordination front across funding opportunities and trying to get a better sense of when technologies are ready for what type of funding financing, as part of this process. I guess two questions: One, is that also information that you're hoping to disseminate so that folks who are spending the time putting together applications don't end up putting a lot of time and effort into one program when really they should be fitting into another? And then also, is there an opportunity to move ideas within programs? I know there's probably a limitation because right now, every funding opportunity is a separate funding opportunity. So, I guess what flexibility would be required to maybe help accelerate some of that coordination and shuffling.

AVI SHULTZ: That's a great question. I would say to the first part of your question, absolutely. And I think you'll hear later today about some of what we're working on to improve and develop new publicly available analysis and mapping out of technologies so that we can really understand where they fit and communicate that effectively about where they fit in different programs and networks. I'll say, yeah, we don't probably have as much flexibility that would be ideal in terms of moving projects between different kinds of offices and programs just, of course, due to federal acquisition regulations and some of the things that we need to be consistent with their … What I would say though is that we have a huge amount of coordination internally with these offices talking to each other so there is no shortage of—and we'll hear much more about this—no shortage of discussion, no shortage of sharing experts from different offices on different opportunities. So, when we make our decisions through both merit review panels, external reviewers, which sometimes include internal reviewers, when we put together our federal consensus panels for making funding decisions, we have a heavy emphasis on including representatives from across the department to ensure that we're not stepping on each other's toes in terms of missing insights that other offices within DOE can bring to these programs.

ABIGAIL REGITSKY: Absolutely.

ARPITA BHATTACHARYYA: So, we've been working really closely with our General Counsel to figure out what pieces can we share across programs. I mean, even sometimes in Loan Programs Office, it's like if they're switching which program they're going to be in, we think about, “OK. How can we just replicate instead of making folks do this over again?” But I think you're exactly right. I've been pitching for us to take that climate tech VC structure and really share it out because it is really hard to tell what to apply for. And I think that's something we're thinking a lot about and getting it out publicly.

AVI SHULTZ: So, with that, I know we have other questions, and we will try to get to them through the day. But we're joined by a very special guest that we're very, very excited to have with us this morning. And so I'm very happy to introduce Christopher Davis, the chief of staff of the Department of Energy to come talk to us a little bit about how important this initiative is to the Office of the Secretary. Thank you, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS: Thanks so much and sorry the secretary herself couldn't join because this is an issue that is really close to her focus as secretary. She recently gave a speech outlining of what she sees as the department's role in industrial policy in the U.S., particularly around the energy transition. And it's an interesting time that we are, as a government, talking about an industrial policy probably for the first time in about 40 years and not scared off by this notion that capitalism and the free market has dictate how everything is done because we've seen that has led to a deterioration of our supply chains and our domestic industrial base.

So, with the tools that we have here at the department, both on the research and development on the analytical side paired with the responsibilities Congress has given us through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, we're able to in a way that this department hasn't in a long time, but the government has in a long time really think through and shape the trajectory of how we're manufacturing in the U.S. and what our industries look like in the U.S.

So, it's just an incredibly important time for the department, both, again, as on the earlier end in terms of providing the information and the research that goes into new technologies and then figuring out how to deploy them more quickly and more pervasively throughout the ecosystem prior to the … I had the pleasure to serve during the Obama administration for Secretary Chu and Secretary Moniz, and we accomplished a great many fantastic things in the department and moved our policy and our science forward on a lot of these issues. But we were hampered in a way by the model of the Department of Energy where we would advance a technology and then just hand it over, elevate it, and say, “All right. Private sector industry, you can take this and run with it.” But that, as it turns out, hasn't really accomplished the uptake we want and the speed we need to be competitive. So, really thinking through more of the commercialization of the technology and thinking through the financial markets and what they're looking for to be able to invest in it, making sure that they don't need us to—when we talk about our demonstration projects, they don't need us to build it, demonstrate it, and have it run for 10 years, and show that it's profitable before they decide to build another one. They need to be building the second through 10th ones even before we're done building the first one.

That's the pace of industrial decarb that we need in this country. So, that's really what we're focusing on and really what you as an advisory board is just going to be so critical for you guys to think about how we are not doing business as usual as the Department of Energy, how we're not doing business as usual as the federal government but really getting that acceleration, that kind of tsunami effect, where we're getting kind of a very credible building on success and building on that success to accelerate everything across the industry.

Dr. Schultz knows as well, but we recently reorganized our efforts around industrial and within EERE to focus more on the decarbonization and the efforts that go into that. And in parallel, we have our offices in the Undersecretary of Deployment or Undersecretary of Infrastructure that are going to be focused on the large-scale demonstrations and really the pairing of these two programs is going to accomplish I think what the Secretary is looking to do in this industrial space, which is to both move the technology out into the ecosystem quicker but also provide a more reliable feedback loop so that we have more live information on the commercial sector what the needs and gaps are that we can feed right back into the R&D effort and increase that the life cycle of that loop as well.

Some of you are probably aware, one of the big programs in the congressional legislation was in industrial decarbonization deployment program. We are poised to announce awards in that area very soon in the coming weeks. So, you'll see there some of this in action industries where we've done work on how to decarbonize them including huge carbon emitters like steel and concrete and everything even food and beverage production, really putting that to practice in the field and actual operating industrial facilities. And that's going to be a very exciting opportunity.

When we think about really the opportunity in this space though, it remains probably an area that the federal government and the DOE are farthest behind on if you think about all of our efforts over the decades to figure out how to decarbonize the power sector and decarbonize the transportation sector. This is going to be the hardest area to tackle. And so really appreciate this board being stood up to really give the intellectual heft, make sure we're applying our research deployment efforts in the right directions.

And I just can't overstate how much importance the secretary places on this. And I'll just finish where I started, which is that I never thought, a few years ago, that we'd be in a place where we, as a government, are talking about industrial policy. And we're talking about industrial policy in the context of decarbonization. And that's just a really—it seems natural to those of us who follow this really closely because, if you're going to decarbonize the power sector, if you're going to decarbonize our nation as a whole, it will drive a whole scale change in the way we do all of our business in the U.S. and the way we do our industry as well. But I think the Department of Energy and our efforts are probably—we're not thought of as going to be so central to the planning of how this is going to all happen as we ended up being through this legislation and as I hope we end up being through our smart policy and smart research and development.

So, thank you. I think the work that you do is going to be really critical in guiding that effort and just really appreciate you coming together and serving in this way. So, thank you so much. Thank you.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thank you so much, Christopher, as well as Avi and Arpita. We are going to move on to the next section of our agenda, so I'll be moderating this section. But that said, will be familiar faces because Avi is going to come right back up and be a part of this first presentation. So, in this next block of time, we're going to be talking about DOE's approach to industrial decarbonization strategy. The good news, given that you all have a report to write, is that there is a lot of great work that's already happened at DOE for you to build on. So, we'll talk about some of those reports that have already been published by DOE and get into some of the other strategic and coordination efforts. So, with that, I will welcome Avi, and then Joe will also be doing I think the bulk of this first presentation.

AVI SHULTZ: Yeah, why don't you come up as well Joe, because, I'll be I'll be very quick here. I just wanted to get the presentation up hopefully. I just wanted to be very quick with a little bit of an introduction to what we're going to talk about here in this session and specifically what Joe is going to dive a little bit deeper into.

And maybe I'll just say, on a slightly personal note, the reason I came to IEDO and took the position is because very much, just as Christopher Davis was just saying, this feels like a moment in time where our attention and the attention of the country and the attention of a lot of really smart folks and really a large degree of resources are turning towards this huge question of how do we decarbonize the industrial sector that had unfortunately gone a little bit below the radar before, really just the last couple of years.

And the reason I came over to IEDO specifically was because of the foundation of research and thinking that had gone into this in DOE really started with the industrial decarbonization roadmap that Joe is going to talk a little bit more in detail about that really gives us the foundation for us to think about these problems and come up with solutions. And you're going to hear throughout the session the wealth of analysis and research that we've done since that foundational work in the industrial decarbonization roadmap. But we really wanted to start with that to set the basis and then go on from there what we've turned that foundational thinking into in our overall Department of Energy strategy. So, with that, let me turn it over to Joe.

JOE CRESKO: Thanks so much, Avi. And we'll try to drive the slides from up here because I have a handful of animations in here. But one of the things I thought would be really useful sort of as a level setting and getting people thinking about and familiar with the information, the assets, and the resources that we have is to do a relatively high-speed review of the roadmap, in particular, but context about what we have and what we're using to inform our decision making. And with that, today, I'm going to hit first onto some background and context about industrial energy and emissions. The thinking here is that as a committee, you have a mandate. You have work to do, a report to write, and really providing you with this sort of snapshot on the kinds of resources that we have, what we've looked at, and what you can use and build from.

And so we don't want to assume that anyone in this room has that sort of basis. We want to give that first look to folks and let you know from where we've started to where we have gotten to today and where you guys can build on work that we've done and utilize information that we have. So, I'll hit some background on context, talk about the roadmap, and then give us a little bit of a look ahead in terms of ongoing analysis. This is within the context of our vision and mission. Our vision is an efficient and competitive industrial sector with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. And our mission is to accelerate the innovation and adoption of cost-effective technologies that eliminate industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Now, this is the vision and mission from our office. And you see innovation here. You've heard that we're doing more than innovation. You're going to see a little bit of a bias in these slides from our office, Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. That's part of the picture. But it really I think speaks to all of what we're doing at DOE. Energy is important. We have a lot of information and decent understanding about from primary sources of energy, what we use, where it goes, and how it's used.

If you take a look at the Sankey diagram that Livermore updates annually, you can see that as a society, we aren't all that good in the energy that we put to use. We lose almost two-thirds of that energy. We can understand within the industrial sector where and how that energy is used with a good level of granularity. Through our Energy Information Administration, we have a lot of access to data that we process from multiple sources. Some of the products that we put out there are even in these visual guides. We refer to them as manufacturing energy, and starting 2018 data, carbon footprints. And again, all of this information will be provided to you in the links that are buried here. I think this will be provided a good resource for people to take a look at that. So, this information is available for all of manufacturing as well as 15 manufacturing subsectors. We can understand more deeply where and how that energy is used through information that is gathered by through sources such as the manufacturing energy consumption survey. For example, where and how much thermal energy is used by industry. You'll hear a little bit more later. You've heard a bit about some of our Energy Earthshots, one Industrial Heat Shot. It's an important investment and activity because of the enormity of process heat that is used across all industrial subsectors.

But it's complicated. There is no one size fits all solution. By industry, the amounts, and the quality, and the types of heat that are used range from low to medium to high to ultra-high temperatures. This is a huge challenge to decarbonize when you're thinking about something that at first sounds like, well, heat, how is heat used? It gets complex.

We also really need to think about the interactions across scale. So, we think and we focus on the Department of Energy work on energy, energy and energy related emissions. But there's a lot more to that. Energy and greenhouse gas emissions are important, but there are other emissions of hazardous air pollutants, toxic releases. Water is an important focus. We have to think about that in context with the economics. And the economics are important.

So, from the unit operation scale to the facility scale to the product scale or national scale and even international scale is important context. We really also need to think about scales through time scales. And that's something that we take a look at within the roadmap as a basis.

One of the things that I think becomes very valuable for us is that we can take and integrate a number of data sources and look not only within the industrial sector to where and how within industrial subsectors, the types of energy are used. But we have taken a good hard look at the interactions between sectors—economic sectors, the industrial sector, the commercial sector, the residential sector, and the transportation sector.

So, by really having this kind of detailed understanding of where and how energy is used gives us insights into where we can make improvements and changes that can drive the efficiency or make wholesale changes in places where, for example, we may not be able to bring emissions out of current operations. So, some of the tools that we have developed methodologies and tools that we've developed inside of IEDO across manufacturing scales from the most fundamental unit operations all the way up to looking globally at supply chains includes a range of tools and methodologies that you can see on this page.

Again, links we'll provide the people. You can find a lot of this information directly on our website. Type IEDO and analysis and a lot of this information will come up.

There's a certain context as well. I mentioned that this is a little bit through the lens of IEDO. But we really work, of course, across DOE. And one of the things that's been most exciting about this move into thinking about the bandwidth we have with respect to industrial policy, with the new investments and the new parts of DOE that have been stood up is that we are really working tightly across offices, across the pillars as three [INAUDIBLE] four.

We want to ensure that the investments that we make are informed by solid and defensible analysis, data, tools methodologies. We use life cycle analysis and techno economic analysis. And we utilize integrating approaches. Whether we're looking fundamentally at technology areas that we invest in within our office all the way up to important DOE priority areas in which we engage as an office with other offices inside of the department.

So, what we put out there are a range of analysis informed resources. There's a lot of content that we put out there, and we think this is important because we are working for the American people. We are working in a way that we want to make sure everyone understands what we're doing and why we're making the decisions that we're making. There's a red sort of circle or outline around the Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap, and I want to just highlight one other thing.

Some of the content—a lot of the content that we use is not only used by the Department of Energy, but it's actually taken up by, for example, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. For example, in 2021, the last long term strategy of the United States came out. These types of all of U.S. government perspectives utilize the information that we put out there.

So, in this very rapid overview, I'm going to hit on the Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap next. I'll speak to the pillars and associated pathways to help us try to achieve that net-zero greenhouse gas emission goal by 2050. We'll talk a little bit about how we're rethinking the opportunity for research, development, deployment, and demonstration for robust technology solutions and the need for innovations for more sustainable manufacturing. Greenhouse gas emissions are about one part of it, but there are a lot of other environmental justice issues that come along with that.

So, from an emissions perspective, and this is information coming directly from the roadmap, so, folks that have taken a look at may see some of this, about a third of the energy demand in the United States and about 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to the industrial sector. And the roadmap … We took a hard look at five of those industrial subsectors. I'll speak a little bit later. We're expanding and extending that work with our current analysis work. So, those five subsectors include chemicals, petroleum refining, iron and steel, food and beverage, and cement. But all other manufacturing is important as are the nonmanufacturing industrial subsectors. So, industry is broken up into manufacturing, nonmanufacturing. Nonmanufacturing is mining, construction, and agriculture.

It's really important to really think about supply chains and how, for example, the scope—three emissions in the, for example, food and beverage can be attributable to emissions that originate in the agricultural sector.

So, four pillars of industrial decarbonization and their associated pathways … We took a hard look at, one, energy efficiency, two, industrial electrification, three, the use of low-carbon fuels, low carbon feedstocks, and low carbon energy sources, and the use of carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

Some of the high-level takeaways include that need to invest in all of these pillars. We need to leverage cross sector approaches. There are interdependencies across industry and across these pillars that require systems, solutions approaches. And strategies are needed to minimize the implementation hurdles, address scale up, and accelerate adoption.

If we do this and we do this well, and we're very optimistic about our potential for technologies as represented, for example, in this technology landscape figure in the lower right-hand corner, we did this for all of manufacturing. These are examples, and we did this for each of those five industrial subsectors. Dialing the knob up full scale on those potential for deployment and aggressive but achievable scenarios shows us that as we categorize this by pillar, CCUS combined electrification and low-carbon fuels and feedstocks and energy efficiency. We have the potential to drive above 85%, perhaps closer to 90% emissions reduction in the industrial sector by 2050.

So, some recommendations, echoing what I mentioned before: advanced early-stage research and development, invest in strategies, scale through demonstrations. Process heating is important. We need, of course, to decarbonize our sources of electricity this is not going to be just an industry problem. This is an energy transition synchronization, integrating solutions, conducting modeling and systems analysis, continuously and improving that over time as these new technologies come online and engage communities over time.

I talked a little bit about scale. And to highlight the importance of looking at unit operations or at the facility level and beyond the plant bounds, we can even think of, for example, hydrogen. The use of hydrogen means we need to, in some cases, really develop new fundamental operations, unit operations that use that hydrogen. We need the facilities to be able to ramp up and be able to utilize that. Those that don't have it, for example, already.

And we need to think about the infrastructure to get hydrogen to these facilities in context with the demands for hydrogen in other sectors of our economy. We need to think about things like what are the implications of the expanded hydrogen generation and the use of new thermal energy systems and sources, the opportunities for smart manufacturing and transition to a clean electricity, and the need for policies that can accelerate and incentivize this.

I'm going to just touch on these very fast. I'll leave this kind of in backup because I know we're pretty tight on time. Pillar one, energy efficiency: a range of opportunities we highlighted in the roadmap. Number two, industrial electrification: scale-up, durability, hybrid systems, modular systems. Number three, low-carbon fuels, feedstocks, and energy sources. So, some of those real important levers include, for example, things like renewable hydrogen, bio inputs, and other low-carbon energy sources, including things like solar concentrating power and modular nuclear power. And lastly, carbon capture utilization and storage where there are, again, technical and economic issues to be overcome as well as important infrastructural issues that need to be addressed.

Again, we represented this work in the roadmap with emissions reduction potential, not only by all of manufacturing for those five subsectors, but opportunities by industrial subsector. And as you glance at those figures on the screen, as I'm flying through this, you can see sort of differences in those in terms of which pillars and which pathways are the most viable given some of the assumptions and the inputs from stakeholders that provided input into our work.

There are barriers, and we want to overcome those barriers. And with our current work—thank you. I'm sorry about that. Hopefully, it'll just stop—crosscutting barriers and sector-specific barriers. In our current analytical, work we're taking a very much deeper dive into those barriers, the technical, economic, and policy barriers, that exist.

So, we've got a range of recommendations, including pursuing industrial heat, driving capital investment, and developing a robust research development and demonstration portfolio for cross-sectoral and innovative thermal processes. So, these are a number of the recommendations. You can sort of see generating heat from clean electricity, leverage low-capital solutions, driving new low-carbon industrial heat technologies and pathways as one example in this thermal space.

So, looking ahead ongoing analysis, we've been busy. We haven't sort of just been leaning back. We are doing what we refer to as roadmap extension and expansion analysis. So, we are looking at more deeply into all of those industrial subsectors that we looked at in the roadmap but extending that to food and beverage, to forest products, and other industries.

We want to get a comprehensive look at all of industry, cross-sector technologies in a more rigorous way. Looking at thermal processing, some of the utilization of very targeted low-carbon inputs, the issue of water and other cross-cutting assumptions that we are basing our calculations on. So, expanded bottom-up analysis, transparent and documented and flexible tools that are available not only to people inside of DOE but will be made available externally, adding resolution in terms of fuel sources, process emissions, adoption rates, electrification, et cetera, and refining our pillar breakdown more deeply.

So, building upon the roadmap, there's a level—you can sort of see in this outline that the roadmap touched on pillars, levers, and core technologies. And our ongoing analysis in a cross-sectoral way and in a cross-economy way is going to be looking at more areas than what we covered in the roadmap.

There is a long tail of emissions from the industrial sector. The big guys, the big emitting industries are a challenge. Another challenge is the fact that it's kind of that—what's the term—death by 1,000 cuts. There's a lot of smaller industrial subsectors that on whole aggregate up and drive our emissions footprint in that sector.

Lastly, I really want to emphasize the focus on that industrial decarbonization really intersects with sustainable manufacturing. This means it's not just the CO₂ energy related CO₂ emissions but all greenhouse gas emissions for all subsectors and beyond CO₂ equivalents all industrial emissions.

So, the imperatives for industrial decarbonization include the fact that incremental solutions are insufficient. There will need to be a transformation of the industrial sector between now and mid-century. CO₂ emissions from inefficient materials flows are also a problem.

Energy is part of the challenge. Full resource efficiency is important. And again, greenhouse gas emissions are but one environmental impact factor. We have a need for more thoroughly sustainable manufacturing. This means we need to expand and improve our analytical capabilities.

Types of technologies that are emerging are hard to assess through traditional life cycle analysis techniques. We need to drive into using newer and expanded analytical techniques and syncing up with academia in some of these operations and these processes. Industrial decarbonization is a complex systems challenge.

I will close with: Almost 1 year ago to today, Professor Doyne Farmer gave a talk, keynote talk at the REMADE Conference. REMADE is one of our manufacturing innovation institutes. And over an entire career of looking at technology adoption and portfolio analysis, he's come up with four bullet points that I think are pretty good: One, investment strongly influences outcomes; two, too much diversification can be a bad strategy. We need to be thinking critically about the investments we make. It's essential to make those targeted investments. We need to put a few eggs into the right baskets so our job, what eggs, what baskets.

Thank you. And I really want to thank the extended analytical team that we have in IEDO that includes folks from a number of national labs and consulting firms that provide input to this. Thank you very much. Sorry for the speed.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thanks, Joe. And we will have time for Q&A at the end of this presentation. So, it is going to be a lot of material to ask questions about I think in a short time. But up next … So, we'll get the next slide deck pulled up. But up next, we're going to hear from Sam Goldman who's a policy advisor with the Loan Programs Office. He's going to be talking about a recent analysis that was published by DOE, the pathways to commercial liftoff reports. So, welcome, Sam.

SAM GOLDMAN: Thank you very much. Great. Not so easy to see, is it? Great, well, good morning, everyone. Sam Goldman. I think I've actually met a good number of you already. But for those that haven't met, I'm actually now sit in our Office of Manufacturing Energy Supply Chains, but supported with a pretty big team.

This effort, Pathways to Commercial Liftoff, a series of three reports: one, cross-cutting effort looking at eight industrial sectors, and then two deep dive reports cement; one on low-carbon cement; and the other on chemicals. I led our deep dive on cement, but we'll sort of speak to the three today on behalf of the team. So, if we flip to the next slide.

I can start just giving a quick overview of the nature of the effort. The impetus for these reports came sort of out of our S3—infrastructure and employment vertical, recognizing that as the department was moving sort of more in the direction of funding some of these commercial scale deployments and trying to unlock deployment of these technologies at commercial scale, owning more of that RD&D continuum, that we needed to do a lot more engagement with the private sector and in terms of actually understanding how these technologies get picked up, how they attract not just public investment up front, but also private sector capital at scale.

And so, that was sort of the motivating factor behind this family of reports. The nature of the work was going out and conducting dozens, hundreds of interviews really with a wide range of stakeholders across the ecosystem, project developers, customers, off-takers on the demand side, as well as investors in the private sector really to understand what they were going to need to see from projects and what conditions we were going to need to have in place to mobilize capital at the hundreds of billions of dollars, trillion dollar scale that is going to be required to achieve full-scale deployment of these technologies.

And I think maybe the last thing that I'll flag is that we have been very deliberate about positioning these reports not as statements of policy or strategy on behalf of the department but rather as exercises that are intended to reflect neutral shared fact base developed, as I said, in close collaboration with industry partners, with investors, and with other stakeholders in the landscape.

So, we have a whole family of these reports. I think if we flip to the next slide, did an initial wave that was focused really more on the power sector—hydrogen, nuclear, long duration storage, and carbon management. All those reports are available. I think the hydrogen and carbon management reports might be particularly valuable to this group. But, obviously, I'm here today to speak to three reports in our second wave.

One, of cross-cutting report led by my colleague Kate Scott, focused on a number of sectors across the industrial space, a second report led by our colleague Marissa Brennan, focused on chemicals and refining and the report that I led focused on cement. All of these are available at on the liftoff website. The URL, for which I should have memorized by now but have not. But I'm sure you can find it.

Great. And if we flip ahead, I think what I'll spend the balance of the time doing, and we'll try and keep this brief, is just giving you all sort of some quick snapshots and previews of some of the analysis that's available in the reports obviously worth reviewing and engaging in closer detail with the material. So, we can start maybe with the cross-cutting report.

Again, I can't claim any credit for this or pretend to know this as well as the folks who actually wrote it. But you can give a quick overview of what they did here. So, looked at a number of the processing and production steps across the value chain in these eight industrial sectors. And then if we flip to the next slide.

Oh, I didn't realize this was animated. All right, yeah, I think we might have to pull a bunch of these. So, then, looking across those eight sectors at a sort of a range of levers where we could see approaches that sort of are financially viable, that are broadly deployment-ready from a technical standpoint. And accordingly, to see where both the biggest opportunities are for immediate deployment as well as where we see continuing challenges and priority areas for future R&D and future progress coming down cost curves and improving commercial viability.

You can flip to the next slide. Then sort of synthesized up looking at developing a perspective in this cross-cutting way for looking at those levers and—which are likely to be economical and deployment ready—how far that gets us. And I think what they found was you can sort of segment external factors, technologies that are broadly deployable today and we think a positive economic case.

Then technologies that are it may be in good shape technology wise but that need to see economic improvements to be deployable at scale. And then finally, parts of the emissions stack where we're still leaning more heavily on R&D and are looking to more emerging technologies. All covered in detail on the report.

And then if we go to the next slide, I think the last thing is actually that I'll sort of tease here is just the breakdown of the economics for those various levers. So, looked at what it actually costs. I did some of the detailed analysis of abatement costs across levers for these different sectors so we can, again, begin to segment those technologies and identify where the biggest commercial opportunities are going to be.

Great. And then, yeah, I think the second piece, this is my text for speaking on behalf of the three is just getting to share some previews from the cement report. I think this is reflective also of the content that you'll find in the deep dives for the other sectors. But did our working closely with our colleagues in IEDO and the other science offices developed our view of where emissions are actually coming from in the sector? Can probably flip ahead.

And then sort of mapped against that emissions profile, identified a range of levers and did the row-by-row assessment of what is deployment costs look like. What does deployment cost look like? What's the abatement potential associated with each? And then what do we see in terms of both TRLs, technological readiness, but also this additional scoring metric, ARL, which tells us about market readiness and capacity of markets to adopt these technologies.

And so, you can see, on the cement side, we identified some big opportunities and the immediately deployable measures around clinker substitution. And then obviously identified areas where the commercial picture is more challenging. We see early-stage technologies and, accordingly, can frame some of those key opportunities in areas for future investment. Can flip ahead once more.

And also, I think important work that we did in these reports was sort of characterize and break down the value chain. So, on the cement side, develops. On the right-hand side, you can see our perspective on customer profile and then sort of strung out along to the left of that the different steps of the value chain, getting at some of the challenges that we see around commercialization of these technologies, all the different stakeholders that have to be aligned to actually adopt these new technologies and some of the challenges implied in sending a demand signal through that attenuated value chain.

And then I think this is the last one that I'll show. But just for each of these sectors, and you'll see this in the cement report and [INAUDIBLE] refining and each of the deep dives in the cross-cutting report, we developed this aggregated view of what the pathways to liftoff could actually look like across different technologies, again, doing that segmentation of where we see some of the short term opportunities, things that are broadly in good shape commercially and deployment ready technologies where we're going to see sort of a longer—where there are still steps, an initial deployment curve to be navigated. And then, obviously, the set of technologies that are on a longer time scale and that we think are going to require more investment to achieve full scale deployment.

I know there will be questions after this but I think that's probably everything for now. Thanks.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thank you very much, Sam. So, from here, we're going to pivot from talking about some of the analysis and reports that have been published to talk about some of the key strategic initiatives and coordination mechanisms that we're using around industrial decarbonization. So, first, we are going to hear about two of the Department of Energy's—energy and Earthshot initiatives. So, these are the two that are most relevant to the industrial sector. Joe Cresko will be speaking about the Industrial Heat Shot, and then we'll have Lisa Guay speak about the Clean Fuels and Products Shot, so I will hand it over to Joe.

JOE CRESKO: Thanks. Thanks a lot. Right, so at eight Energy Earthshots, though this one, on industrial heat, kind of alluded to that with some of the information that you saw so far. And I'm going to have to do this thing now, too, looking backwards. Sorry about that.

So, there's a range of Earthshots that you can see up here on the screen—floating offshore wind, enhanced geothermal, and long duration storage that are really well aligned with our improvements that need to happen with respect to our grid. Industrial heat—electrification, as one example, means that improvements and advances need to be successful here. These Earthshots need to be successful.

The clean fuels and products, again, those two really align with the industrial sector but hydrogen, an important driver for decarbonizing industry and but also for other applications. For example, in the transportation sector and the most recent one, the buildings, Energy Earthshot and the affordable home energy. So, with success, achieving Energy Earthshot has been estimated to achieve save three 850 billion in avoided—almost 4 gigatons of CO2 by independent analysis by the firm organization third way. So, these were announced between June and October 2023. I believe that these eight are the eight. And there will—there will be no more, so a large focus. Here and going forward, each one of them has their own—maybe go to the next slide. Each one of these Earthshots has their own sort of metrics, and their targets, with respect to the heat shot.

It's relatively simple in terms of what you see on the screen, but it is really challenging and is not that sort of easy to think about this given the complexity and the heterogeneity of the industrial sector. But by 2035, the goal is an 85% reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases. By 2035, demonstrating that those technologies are viable, and that could have an impact in the marketplace by midcentury. Next slide.

Why do we choose industrial heat? This sort of simplified pie chart, I think, kind of really begins to show it. Earlier, talked about the industrial sector, about a third of the emissions, about 30% of emissions are attributable to the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. So, if we take a hard look to just industrial manufacturing, it's about a quarter of the emissions because another 67 or so percent comes from mining construction and agriculture within manufacturing. Almost half of the emissions are attributable to the use of thermal systems. And that is a massive opportunity. Next slide.

We have a lot of information and solid understanding about where and how heat is used. From relatively low temperatures, 300°C or even lower for certain applications, especially sensitive drying application, these are just a range of examples that give you a sense of the span and the scope of applications where thermal energy is used within industry for certain operations. Whether it's operations like drying or the use of steam for a range of applications.

Today, the reason that the emissions are so high is because 95% of that thermal energy is provided by the direct or indirect combustion of fossil fuels. You're either combusting natural gas, for example, in a furnace, in an oven, or you're producing steam, by the use of fossil fuel combustion on site, And so, that heavy fossil fuel footprint is the driver for large amounts of emissions from these kinds of applications and the further you go up in temperature ranges, and that number can be much higher than 800°C for certain applications. Next slide.

So, we've identified three pathways that we are focusing on within the Industrial Heat Shot. Pathway number one is the use of clean electricity for these thermal operations. So, you can think about reducing your emissions by electrifying equipment through a range of technologies such as director and direct resistance heating or indirect use of things like microwave radiofrequency or induction heating.

Integrating clean heat from alternative sources—so alternative sources, low-carbon energy sources, such as thermal solar thermal or nuclear geothermal or sources of clean, hydrogen, or even some sustainable fuels. The third way is also really begins to help us think outside the box—very transformative low- or no-heat processes. Can we transform a material from one state to another with significantly low or no heat to achieve that effect? So, things like you can think about driving photopolymerization by the use of ultraviolet, or even things like electron beams for those operations. So, we need enabling technologies, we need energy storage. We need materials. We need modeling and data analytics to support all of these efforts on these three pathways.

Next slide. I think we're probably close to wrapping this up. So, investments, we've made a number of investments. One of you mentioned this earlier today. For example, we've awarded a large investment two our manufacturing innovation institute EPIXC through our office, Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. We've announced awards for research and development projects that are in areas like heat pumps and thermal storage and other decarbonization approaches, for other thermal processes.

There are things like research energy research centers and science foundations for Energy Earthshots coming out of our Office of Science, including two research centers and six science foundations projects for Industrial Heat Shot. And we have a currently open fellow in this area. Next slide. I think that was it. For this, I will turn this over for the clean fuels shot. Thanks.

LISA GUAY: All right. To do the kind of … OK. Go. Hello, everyone. I'm Lisa Guay. I'm with the Bioenergy Technologies Office. And kind of building on what Joe just mentioned, this is kind of a shot that's looking more at that one—was about the process side, this one is the product side. So, the next slide.

So, on the premise of this shot is really we have a lot of carbon based materials that we use in our everyday life. And they're a significant part of our GDP they're a significant part of our job base in this country. And they're also a really significant portion of the greenhouse gas emissions. Next slide, please.

This shot, similarly to what Joe was mentioning, is kind of trying to get the technologies available by 2035 to really put us on a pathway by 2050 to get to net zero. And so, the goal here is to develop cost-effective fuels and products from sustainable carbon resources. Two, achieve 85% or lower greenhouse gas emissions on a net life cycle basis by 2035.

So, what does that mean? Can you go to the next slide? So, on the fuel side we're focused on aviation, maritime, rail, and off-road sectors. And these are really primarily because they're very difficult at this point in time to electrify or use hydrogen for because of the energy density requirements.

In this shot, we're focused on trying to replace about 100% of the aviation fuel and half of the marine rail and off-road by 2050. And then on the product side, we're looking at hydrocarbon chemicals. And these are the largest sectors you saw in some of Joe's slides. This is the largest sector of the industrial emissions, and it's projected to grow significantly also.

And so, we're looking for clean sources of chemical feedstocks for these—a lot of the products we use in everyday lives we've got tires and plastics and textiles represented here. Next slide. In order to do that, we have to find the resources to make into these products. So, on the bio side, there's a lot of biomass available in this country. There's a lot of waste available in this country.

And by 2050, we're expecting there should be about 1,000 million metric tons of those kinds of resources available. We will need more than that to achieve this goal, so there's also significant carbon dioxide component. As well and the aim is to then have by 2050, 400 million metric tons of these clean fuels and products deployed in the economy. Next slide, please.

To do this, we have four pillars so the first one is, how do we get these resources? They're distributed all across the country. They're not in current supply chains. How do we go about retrieving those resources and sorting them and cleaning them up so that they're in a format that we can consistently and robustly use to make these fuels and products.

The second one is how do we do an efficient conversion process? Right now, a lot of the technology released carbon dioxide, and we really want to keep all of that carbon in the embodied carbon of the product as much as we can. And so there's a lot of new technologies that are being worked on from basic to applied scales in this area.

And then the next one is looking at scaling those up. And so there's a lot of risk in some of these sectors right now. And there's a real need for pilot and demonstration scales to integrate those into current supply chains and show that these products can work and meet specifications.

And then last, this one underpins all of the others. We're looking at a full cradle to grave life cycle analysis for these products. And so we need to understand what kind of land use impacts there might be, what end of life will look like for many of these products. And it's very heterogeneity heterogeneous to understand all of these impacts. And then also, look at energy. Equity impacts for how we're going to transform these industries into the future. Next slide.

This slide is just kind of a demonstration of how many different offices we have involved in this effort. And you can see it's all the way from basic on the Office of Science side to demonstration on the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration side. And so there's a lot of applied offices in the middle kind of trying to knit all of this together where we've been kind of working separately in these spaces for a long time. But now, there's an opportunity to work together. Next slide.

This is just a timeline of about the last year. So, we launched in May. And since then, there was a mention of the pathway to commercial liftoff report in the chemicals and refining space that's really relevant here. We have launched a Joint analysis project amongst several of the offices and that's really looking at what are the resources that will be available, and how can we prioritize which feedstocks to apply which conversion technologies to as we make our investments into the future. As Joe was mentioning, putting the right eggs in the right baskets in this space as well.

So, we're really excited about that 18-month analysis that's being done at NREL right now. Then there's a number of different FOAs that are announced here, funding opportunities aligned with the shot. We had a webinar in November. The new billion-ton study from the Bioenergy Technologies Office just came out last week. The update to the 2016 report about what the resources will be available on the primarily the biological and waste side, but there is also a component there for carbon dioxide as well.

And then we're gearing up for our first summit at about the year mark in just a couple of weeks in April. And this is my last slide. Thank you very much.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thank you very much, Lisa. So, up next, we're going to hear from Avi Schultz again as well as Kelly Visconti who is the acting deputy director for manufacturing and workforce development in MESC, the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. They're going to be talking about collaboration mechanisms across some of the structures in DOE.

And I will just flag for everybody. If you're checking your watches, I'm aware that we're running behind schedule. We fortunately have an extra long lunch scheduled. So, we're going to be able to absorb some time into that, and we'll still make sure that there's time for Q&A, and all the presenters to get through their slides. Avi?

AVI SHULTZ: Thanks, Zach. And maybe we'll try to make up a few minutes in this presentation because we've already talked a little bit about some of these coordination mechanisms. We just wanted to follow up now that you've got a little bit more of a flavor of some of the activities, what this really looks like in detail. So, if we go to the next slide.

We've already seen versions of this, but I'll say this is the way that, at least in my mind, is useful to present this, where we have—again, kind of as Arpita talked about this morning or earlier this morning, really offices focused on every single step and stage of the technology demonstration landscape. And it is a little hard to see this slide and also talk at the same time. And really, the way that, again, is helpful in my mind to think about this as this. Figure on the bottom that really talks about how different offices are taking on the different mixtures of technical risk, project risk, and market risk. And so we've got Office of Science, RBE, and the technology offices really focused on bringing phenomena really up to the point in which we've retired the technical risk to apply those new ideas to the challenges that we have in the industrial sector so that we can then work with our partner offices like MESC, like the Loan Programs Office, on how do we bring those technologies up into the realm of project risk and market risk and retire those so that they actually can be functionally deployed.

We also, in the technology offices, work closely with those other offices really in real time on that final step of what this slide shows is accelerating adoption. And that's partly because of the technical expertise that we have in the technology offices that we can the network of experts that we can leverage and mobilize to work with the funding streams and expertise that those other offices have as well to really create a fully technically founded network of technical assistance and deployment programs to accelerate adoption.

So, this is, from a technology maturity scale, the range of offices and programs that we have in DOE. If you go to the next slide, this is just going to break it down rather than by technology maturity, by technology type. So, you heard from Joe on the pillars that we laid out in the industrial decarbonization roadmap. And this figure is showing those four pillars—pillars, in addition to a fifth thrust on the manufacturing technology innovation, that's going to be required to manufacture the technologies that we need to decarbonize manufacturing as it were.

And so this is just showing the scale. This isn't even entirely comprehensive. But the breadth of technologies that we're working with closely, that are working together in DOE, to achieve all of these goals that we're talking about. And if you click one more time. All of these offices in the foundational science research development and demonstration and technical assistance, what is grouped underneath our Undersecretary for Science and Innovation or S3 in the DOE jargon.

This is what we've grouped together in that tiered program that I talked a little bit about earlier. That technologies for industrial emissions reduction development program, so that we can be talking constantly within ourselves to ensure that we are covering that entire spectrum of technology space that Joe talked about in the roadmap. Click one more time.

Then these teams are working closely in coordinating mechanism that Kelly will talk about in a second with these demonstration deployment programs, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Loan Program Office, Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chain, in addition to others. Click one more time.

I just want to say a word. Actually, just click again. Just to show everything up here. I just want to say a word about the tiered program. The reason we started off with the Earthshots presentation right before, this is because we really wanted to emphasize that these are some of the primary mechanisms that we have to coordinate the innovation within DOE. So, we're here in a second about how we're coordinating in the entire department.

But what that tiered program is really doing is focused on making sure that we have programs in each of those technology offices that are addressing all of the thrusts and pillars within the industrial heat shop, the clean fuels and product shot, and the other areas of innovation that we're focused on within the industrial decarbonization space within DOE. So, with that, let me turn it over to Kelly to talk a little bit about how we're coordinating in the department as well. That's, Avi.

KELLY VISCONTI: Good morning, everybody. I think we stand between you and lunch so we're getting there. I know some faces. Nice to see some familiar faces. Nice to meet the rest of you. You have a very important and key task at hand so thank you for your service and being a part of this journey with us. In the spirit of partnership, you can go to the next slide.

When the department did the realignment and established the Undersecretary for Infrastructure realized the importance of making sure we keep that connective tissue between all of the innovation work and driving down technology risk but also addressing the commercial and market risks that we see in this sector and how we have new tools through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act to help address them.

And so the deputy secretary, secretary stood up the joint strategy team for industrial technologies. And this is a whole of DOE effort to take all of the work we're doing and coordinate and move it toward common goals and objectives. So, we have over 10 different offices at least, and this includes everyone from office of policy, office of tech transitions, all of the offices, EERE, and the escort programs, Loan Programs Office … I mean, pretty much, it's everybody coming to the table to be able to understand what those challenges are, identify gaps share information, make sure that we're aware of what's happening across the board at a minimum. And then we've used the joint strategy team to help with the liftoff reports. We had task—excuse me, sub working groups within the joint strategy team helping really drive that analysis to do the proving, to do some of the interviews, to be a part of that whole journey.

And we are envisioning using this group to help with a lot of the work that Joe is doing so that we're making sure it's an integrated, connected single voice that goes out into the world that we're working and singing from the same playbook really. And having that joint understanding, and I think one of the advantages of this structure is it really helps us level up the entire understanding across the department.

I mean, I've learned a ton in the last year doing this work and getting to work with all of the experts on Avi's team, our commercial partners and loan programs, and how do we really stitch all the different pieces together. So, we're really charged with building an integrated team, an integrated approach, to develop a strategy. And I'm going to talk just a little bit about what that looks like given all of the other work that we have ongoing, and how to do that smart. And then engaging externally.

So, one of the other challenges with the multitude of offices is now there's a multitude of offices. And in particular, the alphabet soup of the government gets even more clunky here. And so one of the tasks of the joint strategy team, myself Avi, and Melissa Klembara are the three co-chairs is to be kind of a point of entry for folks who have questions. Where do I go? And we're supposed to be a little bit of, I don't know, concierge service is not quite the right name for it, but to help provide mechanisms and communication tools.

So, one feedback we heard from some several folks was we need like one place to go. So, we built a common website that links to all of the relevant industrial decarbonization efforts across the department. Certainly, we'd love to improve the website. We'll get there. But at least, there is a point and a place that you can go to then be the one stop shop to start investigating where you go from there.

So, that's just one example of the kind of thing we're really trying to do to build this connective tissue and be more integrated from the outside world so you don't need to know I'm trying to find somebody in loan programs or MESC or IEDO. You don't need to know the alphabet soup. You can talk to someone, and then we help you find the right places to go. So, that's kind of our three focus mission. If you go to the next slide, please.

Just a little bit about the strategy and how that kind of wraps around with the other work that's out there. So, I really think of the roadmap and the roadmap extension work that Joe and the team are doing as painting that picture and the vision for where we need to be to get to that 2050 net zero dream and goal. And then the liftoff reports in that short term, what are the feasible things that we can and need to be driving forward? And we need both of those things to be happening in parallel.

So, the joint strategy, we are working on an outline and trying to develop what that looks like. Ideally, this is interagency. It's not just Department of Energy. We have many tools, but we do not have all of the tools that we need to solve this problem. To be an overarching strategic approach that ties these together, I think of it as the unified theory of industrial decarbonization, if you will, a shorter document that can point to all of the resources that are being built and allow these two documents to be more living, breathing, ongoing, updated documents.

The industrial sector ties to the hydrogen roadmap. It ties to carbon management. It ties to clean electricity. There are many pieces of the puzzle that have to come together. And what we're trying to paint in this overarching strategy document is the collective vision of how all these things have to move forward and what those real barriers are. So, not to be duplicative of work, but to be integrative is really the approach.

And then that translates into execution with multiyear program plans—how we design our funding opportunities, how we select projects, and then, ultimately, execute and monitor and feedback. I think there was a comment earlier about creating feedback loops of what we learn from large-scale demonstrations and being able to feed that back into the research and development cycle which I think is really, really important for us to make big progress.

I think that was pretty much it from me. Anything else? OK. Thank you.

ZACH PRITCHARD: [INAUDIBLE] stay up here. All right. You can't get away that easy. So, I'll invite Avi back up, Joe, Lisa, Sam. Is that all the speakers that we just had? All the speakers who are just in that block for group Q&A. I know we covered a lot there, but have 10 minutes or so for folks to ask questions. And I'm seeing Akshay's tent to go up first.

AKSHAY SANHI: I was quick to put my thing up. But first of all, I have a comment and then a question. The comment is that the industrial decarbonization report and the liftoff report that you put together, they are some of the most comprehensive well-done reports that we have come across. So, all those who have been involved, kudos to them. Thank you so much. There isn't one place repository of all this good information. We can go to your website to get it. So, thank you. I think my comment is around a phrase that I think, Joe, you quoted one of the thought leaders. It was mentioned a couple of times that we need to select the right eggs for the right baskets. And we're dealing with a huge machinery, lots of departments, lots of funding mechanisms. Where do you think is the governance, the decision making so that we're picking the right eggs and the right baskets? And then the follow up question is, how does this team, the newly formed team, help us get us there?

JOE CRESKO: I'll start quickly. I think what I wanted to try to emphasize was that analytically informed decision making. And I think this is really one of the things with DOE. It's really great about working at DOE because this is a science and technology organization with a long history of doing its homework.

That drives decision making in this organization from the programmatic offices all the way up. And my experience somehow having been here more than a decade, which is hard to believe, is that—that is listened to, meaning, the information, the way that we make decisions from the technology offices, from the grassroots level, we're given that sort of mandate to do that. And while we may have these priorities, congressional funding it's a big complex machinery. But the work that we do is the basis and the foundation for it. So, I would start with that. I think there's a lot more complexity to the overall process. I think the other thing that's happened is that some of the offices are newer. And so it's taken us a little time to synchronize that. But people knew this was going to be hard and thought about this. And as Kelly mentioned, and obviously, with the joint strategy teams in this integration, I mean, we work together tightly all the time. This is one organized team. So, it's not just one office. And I really wanted to make that point. It's like I'm speaking for IEDO, but this is representative of the homework that all of the offices do in the way that we work together.

KELLY VISCONTI: [INAUDIBLE].

CATHY CHOI: I have lots of questions, but I have one question, and then a comment afterwards that's somewhat related. Is there a reason why in the roadmaps there's not an emphasis on like recycling or reusing or reducing within the roadmaps?

JOE CRESKO: I'll make a quick comment to that. This is an important thing. The idea of materials efficiency and—I really, at least alluded to, it's not just about energy, but it's about resource efficiency. And the roadmap does have that pathway that exists in low-carbon fuels, feedstocks, and energy sources. It is a little bit hidden down one layer. Low-carbon feedstocks can be, for example, biobased inputs. But it can also be end-of-life next secondary materials. And we do a lot of that in the United States with steelmaking. We have the—if not, the cleanest steel in the world because of our significant use of scrap steel and electric arc furnaces. And that process puts us at least half of what less clean steel manufacturers are. So, yes, it exists. In our current work, we're looking we're working on a lot more explicitly. It is very difficult though. Analytically, it's a complex the idea of which re-X pathway to use is very complicated and very challenging so we want to try to get our math and arithmetic correct. But it is an important driver. It's not it's not missing, but at least, in the roadmap, was not as prominent as it will be in some of our future work.

CATHY CHOI: OK. Very good. Thank you. And this is more maybe a comment for discussion tomorrow, but I wanted to bring up because it was actually something you also said. You said we can't approach this—something along the lines of we can't approach this incrementally as it needs to be a transformation.

I think that's going to be challenging because the way we develop product in industry is incremental. And that's because the life cycle of the existing assets is particularly in the heavy duty space in the industrial heavy duty space. You might have these assets for 20 years. So, you're asking in that comment asking for a not a transformation of accepting a new technology. You're asking for business transformation.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yes, to some extent. Maybe I'll just say that—

JOE CRESKO: —It can be a little bit left to interpretation what we mean by we need a transformation. One way to interpret it, at least one way that I think about this, is that if we look at one pillar, for example, the use of efficiency, which we've been driving as an agency for a long time, if we were to dial up to a practical minimum energy intensities for every major material and commodity product we use, we're going to get maybe a third of the way to our emissions reductions. So, being transformational and transformative means we do have to do things differently. And I think things like using process [INAUDIBLE], for example, that is a transformation. If we're going to use clean electricity, for example. That's not sort of business as usual. Your point is one of the most important ones. That if we're going to transform in a way that puts us at competitive advantage, if for every ton of steel, even though we're clean, we're putting about 0.9 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere for every ton of steel we make. We're handling a lot of molecules in an inefficient way. That's what we're referring to, and maybe it's a charge to be more as innovative as we can about this. But it does mean we also will need innovative business practices. And we are cognizant of the fact that if we were to lock in technologies with a lot of these big investments that hinder transformational change, what does that look like? We want to do as much and as fast as we can, and we also want to invest in next generation technologies.

KELLY VISCONTI: Can I add an additional thought?

JOE CRESKO: Please.

KELLY VISCONTI: Yeah. So, I think it's a "yes, and …" situation where we have—I mean, if you look at the liftoff reports, we have to do everything we can possibly do today. And those are more incremental. There are still some transformational leaps. If you look at what's in the liftoff, carbon capture is still pretty expensive venture and somewhat risky from a broader perspective. But to Joe's point, to get to net zero, the tools we have today are not really going to get us there. I mean, my personal thinking is, like 20, 30 years from now, we need to fundamentally be building plants differently than we do today if we really want to see a net-zero future. We can get a long way, but I don't know that we can get all the way. And Joe is doing the analytical work to try to back up what I'm saying here. But the idea is a "yes, and …" We need to innovate. We need to push for the future. We need to find more economic and competitive ways to do that. And we need to be doing everything we can in the incremental stages as we go along. This is absolutely like a transition path in my mind.

CATHY CHOI: So, that's what I would support. It's a really good way to put it, because in industry, I would say, to get to net zero, people are waiting for how to get, as opposed to getting the glide path to net zero. That's not a question, so …

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yeah. We have a couple other questions. So, let's try to get a couple of those, and we'll take a break. So, [INAUDIBLE].

NEAL ELLIOTT: Thank you so much for the incredible work in these liftoff reports and coordinating across all of these offices. It's so important. One of the slides highlighted a breakdown of where you can get a lot of the emissions abatement from a big piece from energy efficiency, for example, which is terrific. Efficiency is important. And my question is about that. Zach, you mentioned that we should focus on things that are within DOE's purview. And one thing DOE does is set efficiency standards for various types of equipment including industrial equipment like industrial electric motors there are standards for. But there are many types of industrial equipment that don't have standards assigned yet, whether it's types of kilns or types of furnaces or steam cracker or catalytic cracker. And the office that sets standards may not have been included there even though there's an emphasis on coordinating across offices. But it strikes me that maybe establishing first-ever standards for a lot of these types of equipment could be a way to create demand pull and help overcome some of those market commercialization challenges. I wondered if any of you had any thoughts about coordinating with the office that establishes those standards and trying to get them in place for industrial equipment of many more types.

AVI SHULTZ: Yeah. I can maybe take that. So, the standards that DOE is involved in—it's a relatively small set of standards that, as you know, doesn't really stretch into the industrial space meaningfully. That set of standards is fairly circ*mscribed by legislation and by regulatory authority that's given by Congress. And we do not have that regulatory authority for the industrial applications that you're talking about. The biggest group of applications for which we do have regulatory authority are for building appliances. And so that's mostly handled out of our Building Technologies Office. But that, again, that authority is fairly limited to that set of technologies. Where we can have a role to play is in analytical support to help industry develop standards. And we do do that work. And that is something that comes out of our programs and our strategic analysis work to help provide the analytical foundation for industry-led standard development. But as of now, we don't have any regulatory authority for what you're talking about.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Let's go over to Anna next.

ANNA FENDLEY: Thanks. And I actually raised my intent on this question of transformational versus incremental that Cathy, I think, Cathy also raised. And there's just one more thread that I want to pull there, which is something else that you said, Joe, on investment influences outcomes. And I guess I'm curious how DOE is thinking about the potential—I don't know of a better word to use other than economic disruption from transformation, etc. I mean, I think from my vantage point, it's harmful if we're going to say we're not going to make whatever cement this way. We're going to build all new cement plants. That's really economically disruptive to communities, people who work in the industry, etc. So, I guess I'm curious. With technology development where DOE is putting its money, how does that factor in? Not an easy question.

AVI SHULTZ: No. It's not an easy question, but it's an important one. And it's one we do think about quite a bit. I'd say there are a few different ways in which we have been attempting to address this in our strategy. One is trying to understand those implications better. I'd say that's in addition to what Joe was talking about before, that's an area which we know was not fully explored in the initial Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap. It's an area of analysis that we have a huge amount of interest and thought into expanding and trying to develop it. But it's not it's not easy to, as you well know, to develop those analytical models. So, that's step one is making sure that we can understand that and bring resources to bear. Step two is ensuring that we're taking those considerations into every stage of technology development. So, one thing that we haven't talked about yet today—I think we'll get to it later—is one of the big tools that we've really developed—and this really came out of the bipartisan infrastructure law and IRA work—is the development of what we call our community benefits plans.

And so this is a mechanism by which in every one of our funding opportunities and as part of every one of our funded projects and it's expanded beyond the bill and IRA projects so it's not just in those projects. But in IEDO, we've absolutely taken that to heart and all of our funding opportunities. And it's a mandatory part of our applications as well.

This is essentially a significant part of the required scope of the projects to address the community impacts of the technology. So, considering workforce, considering pollutant implications of the technologies that can be developed to ensure that there's community engagement in the facilities and technologies that are going to be developed. And of course, that looks a little bit different for where you are in the technology scale, but it's something that we absolutely believe and are developing best practices around to ensure that it's taken into account. I'll just flag that, for example, one of the things that we've been working on in IEDO is developing public best practices for those community benefit plans. So, we just released a page on our website specifically for applicants in that RD&D space to understand what it means to meaningfully engage with that community benefits plan and what is not meaningful engagement with that community benefits plan. So, those are the main ways in which we're thinking about that.

KELLY VISCONTI: Can I add one more point? So, I think we have an opportunity to be intentional about the transition. So, if you think about—so, I'll be back this afternoon, talk about my other job. But we have a program supporting coal transition communities, right, so intentional programs to help communities that have been hollowed out because of the energy transitions with the closing of coal mines and coal fired power plants. There's an opportunity now as we're building the future to be intentional about understanding what those impacts could be and what future programs might look like to help mitigate those impacts to communities where change may be coming. So, to me, this is like a really—we have a chance now to really be thinking about it versus being retroactive kind of in the way we do that. And I think it was BlueGreen Alliance. Ben, at the time, when he was there, talked about deindustrialized communities and really trying to understand that. So, just something to continue to think about as we go forward.

ZACH PRITCHARD: I know we have several other questions. I want to take one last one from Comas. And then what we're going to do is hopefully reshuffle the schedule some but let folks take a break for lunch, and we'll do all the IEDO presentations afterwards. So, Comas, let's hear from you.

COMAS HAYNES: OK. Thank you. And I did put some of the questions in blue, so thanks for the Murial effect as well. The one I'll go with though is to Sam. I appreciate the reporting regarding economics. And just do a pick up from what Joe said. We know the industry is technically a very heterogeneous. They're hom*ogeneous in one regard. They all are trying to make all. So, in your study, when you're looking at the viability, and I think a lot of it's based upon cost, is there any kind of even-tempered look at the increased revenue as well? And the backdrop of that, real quickly—and I guess food is a theme with lunch coming—but you look at it, people are willing to pay more for, quote, unquote, "clean" fuel. I mean, food. Food, right? There is a market, a growing market. People are willing to pay. They know it's going to cost more. They're sensitive enough to pay more. And to a certain extent, I think that somewhat maps, at least in certain—I'm sure this does vary from industry to industry—but again, increased revenue. So, when you're looking at the viability, is there any look at even conservatively estimated increased revenue because you will have people that are willing—they want to see low [INAUDIBLE]? We see it all the time when we go into stores. As you know, products that have nothing to do with energy in and of themselves, but they brag about the fact that they were made with low emissions, even purchase credit. So, are you considering that at all in your studies?

SAM GOLDMAN: Yes. It's a really good question and important point.

AVI SHULTZ: I think [INAUDIBLE].

SAM GOLDMAN: Oh, yeah. It's probably … Small room, but why not? Yeah.

AVI SHULTZ: [INAUDIBLE]

SAM GOLDMAN: Oh, gotcha. OK. Yeah. So, I think really, really good question, important point. I think the way we treat it for modeling purposes in the report is really just sort of that cost baseline. Like, we factor in incremental revenue from tax credits and things like that. So, when you see like those heat maps, and the green boxes and the red boxes … Stuff that's in a red box, that's really on a cost basis.

The narrative that frames obviously is sort of what would you have to believe story of if we see that it's 30% more expensive to produce the material by this route, do we believe there are customers who are willing to support that additional 30%? And we discussed that in some of the reports, I think, it comes up in the context of cement, obviously, as we think about public procurement, potential to support premiums there. In general, I think what we've found in engaging with industry is that it's one thing to say, yes, we value this. Yes, we want to decarbonize our supply chain. It's another thing altogether to actually go out and do that and put a price on a clean material. And so I think, candidly, having done this work, I'm a bit more skeptical of the extent to which we're going to support significant premiums on that basis. But I think you can look at other markets and jurisdictions. Like I think in the EU, there's a whole like social license to operate basically independent of the policy regime where companies that are not taking material steps to decarbonize our supply chains are being penalized by consumers. And so you could envision a world where we move in that direction. I think the other challenge—and I realize I've been talking for a while and folks want to go eat—but the other challenge is obviously as we talk about industrial commodities way upstream in the supply chain, a lot less visibility there from the kinds of consumers that might be inclined to price in some of those attributes. And that's something we see in cement, not just folks that might value the additional green attributes, but also have the margins and the capacity to support those costs. Those folks are all the way down at the other end of the value chain. They're not actually buying cement directly. And so that's some of the challenges that we see in actually supporting deployment of those levers.

JOE CRESKO: I'll just add on super fast with the—

ZACH PRITCHARD: Super fast for this.

JOE CRESKO: The idea of industrial policy, etc., which was brought up … There's been some big investments you can think about that as a policy lever that's happening now. And there's other things like the federal buy clean program. And this question about what is a green premium that can be tolerated. Well, we're in a big experiment. Now, there's a lot of money that's going out, and there are a lot of initiatives that have been stood up and, so, federal procurement for four categories—steel, flat glass, asphalt, and concrete, cement concrete. And so, these are things that we're going to learn a lot from over the next few years that are going to give us I think a lot more insight into questions like this, which is very important.

ZACH PRITCHARD: All right. Thank you, Joe. And I think a lot of other people were nodding along with Sam up here, too. So, I think there's a lot of endorsem*nt of those comments.

So, Sharon, if this sounds good to you, what I'm going to propose, is that we go ahead and break for lunch, and then reconvene in about an hour so around 1 or 1:05. And then, we will start all of the IEDO presentations after lunch. OK. I'm seeing nods from Sharon. Let's proceed with that. Thank you, everybody, for your attention this morning. And we will pause the recording over lunch.

[APPLAUSE]

KELLY VISCONTI: There we go.

[CHATTER]

[BREAK]

ZACH PRITCHARD: Please, before you start, welcome everybody back. Yeah, welcome back, everybody. Just one request, a reminder, please do identify yourself in the microphone before you speak for questions. We've had some folks out in the virtual audience who are having trouble keeping track of who's speaking.

So, Joe is going to moderate our next session so I'll let him take it from here.

JOE CRESKO: OK, thanks, Zach. And we'll kick off the afternoon session. I know we adjusted the schedule a little bit so we've got a few speakers that think we're going to condense a little bit to get us back online. And with that, I'll introduce Avi Schultz to come back and give an overview of our office. So, Avi?

AVI SHULTZ: Yes, thanks, Joe. And again, I'm going to take a little bit less time than was originally scheduled on the agenda, given that we're going to have some follow up presentations going into a little bit more deep dive of our office program. So, I'm going to condense a little bit. So, there will be a probably a series of slides that I'll go through relatively quickly. But rest assured that there will be more detail given to all of that as we go through the next couple of presentations.

There we go. OK, so, let me start, of course, from the high level and talk about what our scope is in IEDO, which is to say that we are focused on the administration's goal of achieving a fully decarbonized economy, a net-zero economy by 2050 and with an interim goal of hitting a fully net-zero electricity grid by 2035.

We all know that we're making significant progress on the grid on the transportation sector and electrifying significant portions of our commercial and residential building portfolio. The industrial sector, however, is a huge part of this challenge and one that has not, as we've been talking about necessarily [INAUDIBLE]. The appropriate amount of attention over the last several years despite the fact that this represents about a third of the nation's primary energy use and about 30% of the energy related CO2 emissions from the entire economy.

And this is a growing challenge. We do not anticipate the industrial sector staying still or decreasing quite the opposite in order to meet a number of our economic national security workforce goals. We anticipate at least approximately—or I should say EIA estimates a growth of about 30% of energy demand by 2050, which, if we do nothing, will result in a 17% increase in carbon dioxide emissions from the industrial sector.

So, that leaves us in, obviously, a little bit of a challenge. We have a manufacturing subsector in the US which is an integral part of our economy, a foundational part of our economy. I would say in terms of economic contributions, in raw numbers, percentage, in workforce numbers. And this probably understates the case of what we need to—of the value that this brings to communities, to our nation's strength.

And our challenge is to continue this growth while decreasing CO2 emissions. And I want to be perfectly clear about that. Our goal, when we talk about decarbonization, it's in our office title in IEDO. Our goal is to achieve decarbonization of the industrial sector without deindustrialization.

Theoretically, that would decrease carbon emissions. That is not our strategy. Our strategy is very explicitly to strengthen and continue the growth and even accelerate the growth of our manufacturing sector while decreasing total CO2 emissions.

There are some pretty significant barriers to that. First, certainly, in terms of the scale of investment that's required. So, just for one recent analysis from—I'm sorry. Actually, both of these numbers come from the DOE pathways commercial Liftoff, which we heard about this morning just for eight industrial sectors that are focused on in the Inflation Reduction Act.

We're talking about an investment scale on the order of about $1 trillion. So, that's pretty significant and well beyond the resources that any office in DOE or the government has today. And then the other kind of key barrier that we think about, again, that we talked about this morning from the Liftoff report is that—while that Liftoff report really importantly quantified that about 40% of emissions can be cost effectively addressed with technologies today that are commercially available, what that means is that there are 60% of technologies—or 60% of industrial emissions that are not cost effectively addressed with technologies that are developed today—that are available today.

That means that we need to develop those technologies. What it means is that there's a real opportunity both in terms of the scale of the investment and the scope of technologies that need to be developed for a series of really targeted investments in research development and pilot scale demonstrations in order to advance these technologies to the point at which they can be available for cost effective deployment by the by the private sector.

I'll bring this slide up again that Joe had this morning in the context of the roadmap and the analysis of the technologies that we need. And I bring it up again to emphasize that this is really the foundation of how we think about our RD&D challenge as well as the technical assistance work in IEDO, which is to say that we need to be thinking at many different levels of technology development and systems.

We have work on core technology process development. That is essential. That is the foundation of a lot of the work we do in developing the widgets and the key core technologies that are going to be deployed. But we very much think about what those technologies are going to look like at the facility.

There's no such thing, certainly not in the industrial sector, not really in any sector. But certainly not in the industrial sector. There's no such thing as a component that has a techno economic case for itself outside of the facility context in which it's going to be deployed. And there are inputs, whether energy inputs or product inputs, that need to be considered in terms of whether there is actually a cost effective use case for that technology.

And then we also need to think about beyond the plant bounds as well. If we're thinking about, say, hydrogen utilization in industry, well, we can't really figure out what that means and what technologies are going to be important unless we have a feasible image of what, say, a national or regional hydrogen network looks like.

What's going to be the time availability of hydrogen? What's going to be the cost of hydrogen? What's going to be the purity of hydrogen at that location and at that time? So, we're thinking about technology development at all of these levels of system integration.

I'll bring this slide up again that I showed this morning with Kelly just to show you the entire DOE landscape. And I'm bringing it up again just to highlight where IEDO fits into this. Again, we talked about a little bit about this morning.

But we really see ourselves as the key subject matter experts in the industrial sector in DOE where we have that key role of describing the technical problem statements that exist in industrial decarbonization and reaching out to our colleagues in the Office of Science and in the broader scientific community and finding the innovation that has potential for addressing those challenges and problem statements, bringing those technologies along into the initial R&D phases, technical de-risking, and the initial piloting and validation of those technologies so that they're then available really to be demonstrated at a large scale by our colleagues in the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration and then deployed and financed by Loan Programs Office, Manufacturing Energy Supply Chain, the Office of Technology Transitions.

And then at the end of this again, as I talked about this morning, then using that network of technical expertise that we've developed to work hand in hand with our private sector colleagues to develop the analysis tools, technically robust material that they need in order to deploy these technologies into commercial environments.

So, with that, let me transition into a little bit more detail of how our office is set up. So, to achieve these goals that I've talked about, we have built—and actually, I'm sorry. I realize this slide is slightly out of date. We have built out a full leadership team in our office now. So, we've actually no longer have an acting deputy director, but a permanent deputy director, apologies, who's not on this slide.

Dr. Paul [? Gachet, ?] unfortunately, wasn't able to be with us today. But he has now been onboarded onto our office. Have a full leadership team in the office to execute this vision primarily through three technical sub programs or pillars in the office. And I'll go into a little bit more detail for each of these. And you'll hear a little bit more detail from each of these in the next few presentations.

First is our energy and emissions intensive industries sub program, which is looking at the system level approaches to decarbonize specific sectors. So, the sector and system level approaches that are required are cross-sector technologies team led by Isaac Chan, who's looking at the cross-cutting technologies that we need to develop in order to decarbonize the entire industrial sector and that are going to be common components across industrial processes.

And then our technical assistance and workforce development team led by Anne Hampson which works to do that technical networking and technical tool and analysis development that I was talking about to work closely with our commercial colleagues to help them make decisions to deploy cost effective technologies today.

You see here the scale of our budgets. This is our fiscal year 23 budget. We did just very recently get appropriated our fiscal year 24 budget, which was a little bit lower than this mark. Haven't updated the slide yet as we're still working through the implications of what precisely that means for our sub program level budgets. But just wanted to put the numbers on here to give you a sense of the scale of the investments that we have.

So, on the order of 266.5 last year. About 237 million this year that we have. That's on the order of about $1 billion every four years that we have to invest in the industrial sector. So, that's an investment that we think is significant and is meaningful to make the changes that we're talking about.

Before I go into a little bit more detail of our strategy, I also want to bring right up front a point that as we work on this on these goals, we have a strong filter of energy environmental and economic justice over all of our work. And that's with a recognition that not only is this critical to think about in all of the work we're doing in DOE, but in the industrial sector, in specific, the industrial sector has been the cause of a, I'll say, disproportionate impact on communities around the country in terms of energy justice and the consequences of the energy decisions that we've made in this country on a number of different factors community.

And the way we apply this filter in our work in IEDO is summarized on this slide. I won't go through all of the details here. But it stretches from everything we do through our analysis work to understand the quantitative impacts of the technologies we're talking about. Engagement with stakeholders as we consider technology options, identifying equity-related barriers and leveraging our community benefits plans that I talked about this morning to make sure that we're selecting projects that advance our broader goals.

And really thinking from the technology point of view to really developing—thinking about how the technologies that we're developing can really accelerate the potential reduction of on site combustion of fossil fuels and the criteria pollutants that come along with that use and really accelerate the adoption of alternative feedstocks with lower life cycle environmental impact.

So, with that, let me say just a few words about our research and development strategy. So, as I already talked about we invest in both sector-specific technology solutions and cross-cutting technologies that can be applied across the industrial sector. And the way we think about it is really from the bulk emissions point of view.

Where can we make the biggest impact with our programs to address this pie chart? Where can we find the biggest wedges of the pie chart? And so certainly in our sector work. It's looking at it from this sector point of view. And our cross-cutting work, it's doing analysis like what Joe presented with the Industrial Heat Shot and identifying say the critical role that industrial process heating technologies have in our cross-cutting portfolio.

So, with a little bit more specificity, these are the primary focus areas in each of these two teams. So, in our energy and emissions intensive industries program, we've identified in particular five sectors that really account for—I think these five sectors together account for about 65% of emissions from the industrial sector. And these are really the big ones that each has their own specific challenges, their own specific network of supply chains and unique technologies that need to be addressed in iron and steel, chemicals, including the refining sector, food and beverage, forest products, cement and concrete.

Our cross-sector technologies team is focused on these thermal processes and systems—low-carbon fuels, feedstocks, energy sources we've already talked about, emerging efficiency, including smart manufacturing, digital manufacturing, industrial load flexibility, and a significant water and wastewater treatment portfolio.

And I'm probably running short on time. Let me just emphasize a few more things before I hand it over for some more detail from the teams. What I really want to emphasize is that even though we're only about a year and a half old, slightly more I guess now in March in terms of an office, the team has done an amazing amount of work in getting funding out and actually executing our programs.

And so these are from our RD&D programs just in the last less than a year, I believe, that we've announced all of these selections from a fiscal year 2022 [INAUDIBLE]. We announced 135 million dollars over 40 projects just about a month and a half ago in January. About two months ago, we announced $171 million across 49 specific projects. And last year, we also announced in our water portfolio about $30 million over 10 projects to decarbonize the lifecycle of water resource recovery facilities.

From that most recent announcement we made, from our 2023 funding opportunity, this is 49 projects across all of these seven different topics. You can see on the slide that distribution, the scale of funding in each of these different areas with a huge variety of different kinds of organizations. I mentioned earlier today how all of our projects are. Interdisciplinary, but even if you just look at the lead organizations for these, you see what I think is a really impressive mix of contributions from private industry, academic institutions non-profit research organization, as well as our national laboratories.

We're certainly not stopping there. We have two new funding opportunities on the street that we're currently in the process of reviewing applications for from both our cross-sector technologies and our energy and emissions intensive industries team.

We've already talked a little bit about EPIXC. I'm going to skip over this, These next series of slides, I'm going to go through very, very quickly just to emphasize how as we think about each of these sectors we are identifying in our practical strategy both the cross-cutting and sector-specific approaches that we need to take, and this is really specifically reflected in what we're asking for in our funding opportunities and what we select in our projects.

Again, you're going to hear more about this in our chemical sector. You see the specific areas of interest, particularly the particular focus of electrochemical reactors, high efficiency thermal reactors, and advanced separations. I'll just quickly mention our RAPID Institute, which is another clean energy manufacturing, or excuse me, Manufacturing USA Institute that was originally stood up previously under the advanced manufacturing office. We just a few months ago announced the renewal of this for five years with a $40 million federal investment to really focus in on the challenges of decarbonization of the chemical sector and really to bring the network that you see on this slide to bear on those challenges.

In iron and steel—again, number of sector-specific approaches that are really is what we're emphasizing in this area, thinking about alternative reductants, molten ore processing, and then carbon capture and storage on existing blast furnaces. Cement and concrete—a number of additional sector-specific approaches that many of which were highlighted by Sam in his presentation this morning.

Food and beverage—this is where there's quite a bit of overlap with the cross-cutting team on low-carbon fuels for our electrification for low-carbon steam. But there are sector-specific approaches here that our EEII team is focused on, including thinking about alternative protein products. Waste management is a really critical one for the food and beverage sector as well as innovative cooling, refrigerating, and freezing technologies.

Similar story for forest products. There's a lot of cross-cutting technologies that we need to bring to bear, including low-carbon steam generation. But a number of sector-specific approaches that we're taking here as well. Particularly, focused here on energy efficient separations. Both for food and beverage and forest products really a key driver of energy intensive is water removal and water separation.

And that leads me to one of the last things I want to emphasize in our RD&D portfolio, which is in that water portfolio we have, one of our key mechanisms that we stood up a number of years ago, the DOE a number of years ago is the National Alliance for Water Innovation. And this is a hub led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that's really focused on ensuring that we're not developing new problems in terms of the energy demand for the industrial sector as we think about where the energy is going to come from for future water supply for the country.

This is an area that is rapidly growing in energy demand as we face increasing energy scarcity and stress in the country. And this is a critical mechanism that we have in IEDO that we're helping to use to lead energy water nexus efforts in DOE to ensure that we can future proof the country against future demands for energy intensive water.

I have a few slides also on our technical assistance workforce development program which I'll also go through quickly. You'll hear more detail on this. I've already talked a little bit about the framing of our tech assistance work. I really want to emphasize that what our goal here is in this program is to understand what the private sector needs in order to make the best and fastest decisions to deploy energy efficient and low-carbon technologies. And the way we can help with that is by developing tools, analysis, reports, networks, trainings, examples of case studies of how the private sector can make these decisions most effectively.

Our flagship work here is really through the better plants and better climate challenges, where companies can voluntarily raise their hands and commit to energy and emissions reduction goals. And by doing so, they gain access to this entire suite of resources that we've been developing.

This has been a really, really successful program. Not going to go through again this in detail. But a few numbers here on this slide in terms of the impact that this program has had. And I'll just emphasize the last one, which is that better plants partners directly represent about 14% of the entire energy consumption of the US manufacturing footprint. That's not 100%, but that's a pretty big number and a pretty big group of leaders in the manufacturing field to really blaze a path for the entire industrial sector and to show what can be done in this area.

Again, I won't go too much more into detail on the onsite energy program. And you'll hear a little bit more about this from Meegan a little bit later today. But just to say that we've set up one of our newest programs is this network of technical assistance partnerships that is regionally focused on helping industrial facilities deploy clean onsite energy technologies. So, this really grew out of work that historically has been focused on combined heat and power and really broadening the focus onto this entire suite of clean onsite energy technologies highlighted on this slide.

You've already heard a little bit about our strategic analysis to a toolkit that Joe has really taken the lead in developing for our team. So, I'll be again a little bit quick here. Just to say that this is one of the key outputs of our office that we think is really critical to make available publicly and that we've had huge amount of positive feedback and engagement on.

I'll stop here. Just to say that if you'd like to keep in touch with us beyond this committee and just want to be sure that you are the first ones to hear about anything public that we share in any of these areas, best way to do that is to sign up for our newsletter. And the second, we can share material publicly, we typically do through that.

I'll end as we transition just on this slide of our team today. We just held an offsite just last week. And our team is about—about half of our team has joined in the last year so we've really been standing up a lot of efforts to grow, bring new expertise to the team. We still have vacancies on our team so we're still hiring. But so if anyone in your networks knows of anyone who would be interested in working for us, don't hesitate to put them in touch. And with that, I will yield the floor. Thanks.

JOE CRESKO: Thanks, Avi. And as Zach sets up the computer for Paul Majsztrik who is our program manager for energy and emissions intensive industries, he's joining us remotely. And Paul, in fact, is one of the folks that joined our office I think just a little over a year ago, maybe a year and a quarter, a year and a half ago.

Paul's background, he comes from a background of developing innovative technologies in low-carbon cement in CO2 to plastics, in energy storage. So, really brings a lot of hands-on development of emerging technologies and an understanding of what it takes to develop technologies from early low TRL scale. So, with that, Paul, can you hear us OK?

PAUL MAJSZTRIK: I can hear you well. Thanks, Joe. I'm through, good. OK, excellent. My apologies for not being in person. Really exciting kickoff meeting and very impressive group of people. So, sorry I can't be there in person today.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. It's been a while since I've zoomed. So, hopefully, I've gotten that correct. And so I'm going to full screen. Does that look right? Great.

JOE CRESKO: Yep, looks good. Thanks.

PAUL MAJSZTRIK: Great. So, really appreciate everyone's time. Building on the presentations that the rest of the group have given, especially Joe and Avi. I'd like to just introduce the work that we're doing in the energy and emissions intensive industries program. So, that's the program that's really focused on the sector-specific approach to decarbonization. And I wanted to start off with talking through what our mission is.

And our mission is really to accelerate the readiness of emerging industrial-specific technologies to decarbonize the most energy- and emission-intensive industrial subsectors. And by doing that, what our intent to do is to really enable the industrial transition, this kind of transformative shift in industry to decarbonize through providing the technologies which actually allow for these deep cuts in emissions while also improving things like sustainability and circularity and providing a clear economic pathway for decarbonization.

I think Joe showed a similar chart which this is from the roadmap that Joe led, industrial decarbonization roadmap. I'm pulling this up just to highlight that as we look through the top five or six industrial sectors—forest products, cement, concrete, lime, iron and steel, chemicals, refining, and other manufacturing shouldn't be included in that. Sorry, this bracket's a little too wide. We're looking at roughly 55% of industry or 80% of manufacturing emissions from that group. So, that's sort of motivation for why we're targeting these sectors.

These what we're calling the EEII or energy and emission intensive industries have big emissions. So, there's potential for big impact on decarbonizing the industrial sector through those. They play an important role. It's hard to fully substitute these industries with bringing in new industries or new ways of doing things. And each of these areas has unique decarbonization challenges and solutions.

So, focusing in on specifically on these industries I think really gives us the potential for working with these industries and coming up with solutions that meet the needs of these industries. To do this, we have a strategic plan that relies on a sector-based approach. And we're aiming for decarbonization by 2050.

We've identified levers and enabling technologies in order to make this transition possible, and that's where we're making our investments. We're targeting multiple pathways and really looking at the research development and demonstration projects and technologies in general that have the largest impact. And we're really seeing this as an opportunity where we don't want to focus on the incremental improvements and sort of business as usual, but really look for transformative innovations to make this decarbonization possible.

So, I just wanted to walk through—go ahead and pull all these up—walk through how unique each one of these sectors is without going into too much detail. Each one of these industries has their own unique functions and challenges.

And as we look at decarbonizing them and looking for technology solutions, we're really looking across the entire value chain. Each one of these is sort of unique, and I'm not going to drill down into them. But what I will do on the next few slides is give a few examples of some of the industries that we're looking at and what our approach is.

So, starting with chemicals and fuels, very complicated value chain where we start on the left from our fossil feedstocks, and then have a small handful of building block chemicals on the left. And we work through our value chain all the way to the downstream products on the right. There's a dizzying array of products within the chemical sector over 70,000 products. 70 of which are greater than half a million metric ton of CO2 emissions per year.

And if we look at just the top six, which are given here, 70% of the emissions come from these. So, part of our strategy is to focus on some of these top six compounds here so that we can decarbonize large chunks of the value chain through that. Now, at the same time, we're also looking at value chain approaches, which I won't get into here. But that sort of looks at what is the end use. And maybe we're going to be starting from different materials and maybe even ending up with different materials but still meeting the needs that those chemicals are meeting.

Just wanted to give one example of a project we're investing in that sort of illustrates the transformative impact that we're going for in the technologies that we're investing in. We are supporting a project by E2H2Nano that is a new process for producing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen inputs. So, it's replacing the Haber-Bosch process.

And it's kind of illustrated on the right here. We have the Haber-Bosch process on the left and this new process on the right, which is based around a membrane reactor. It operates at a much lower temperature than the Haber-Bosch process, much lower pressure, the conversion rate of ammonia through this is 50% whereas Haber-Bosch is only 15%.

It eliminates several unit operations and has the capacity to reduce both energy consumption and cost by 80%. So, that's a pretty huge transformative technology for this space. And we're really excited to be a part of that project.

I also wanted to mention, we talk a lot about decarbonization. Avi had mentioned sustainability. Joe had mentioned sustainability. But just wanted to speak briefly about the importance of sustainability, especially in the chemical space, where we're looking at the impact of our raw materials and the processes and the use of resources and the potential for contamination of resources like air and water and how the decarbonization work that we're doing is just an opportunity to revisit how we're doing some of this and select technologies which are much more sustainable than some of the technologies that we're currently practicing and leading to significant environmental and health benefits as well as environmental justice benefits.

The other example I wanted to talk through quickly is in the space of cement and concrete. I think Sam pulled up this diagram earlier which shows the process by which cement is currently made. Roughly 90% of the emissions that come from concrete are due to cement production. And most of the emissions from the cement production come from the operation of calcining limestone and operation of the kiln.

So, it's the high temperature and the chemical conversion of limestone into quicklime that account for those emissions. And cement is kind of unique in the respect that nearly 60% of the emissions come from a process as opposed to heat or energy-based sources. So, it's that thermal decomposition of limestone into calcium oxide that leads to those high CO2 emissions.

And the project that I wanted to pull up, we see lots of pathways to decarbonizing cement and concrete. And cement is such a widely used material and relies so much on local raw materials that we really do see this as multiple paths should be pursued and multiple paths eventually will be used to decarbonize concrete. But one that I wanted to stand up here is an alternative process producing a material that's very similar to Portland cement.

And instead of using the high temperature thermal processing of limestone and silica sources as is done with the OPC process shown in yellow, Sublime has come up with a process that is, A, it uses different raw materials so it's no longer relying on calcium carbonate or limestone so eliminating off the bat the 60% of emissions that come from the limestone calcination or decomposition.

It's an aqueous process. It's a room temperature process. So, the high energy demand of heating to 1450C that OPC uses is eliminated. And it's electrified so if you can get clean electricity to power this, you're essentially decarbonized your energy input.

So, this has the potential for reducing emissions over 90% versus OPC. And again, not relying on limestone as an input, but instead relying on widely available raw materials like basalt rock. So, again, another project that we're excited to be a part of.

Avi had mentioned—just want to round this out by talking about an a showcase for some of the work we're doing within the EEII program. And this is a quick summary of the funding opportunity announcement that concept papers were just due last Friday. We're in the process of reviewing them now. Just wanted to highlight the topics in that funding opportunity announcement.

We've got all the major sectors in here, chemicals and fuels, iron and steel, food, beverage, cement. We've also included asphalt and glass in that space, forest products. And we teamed up with FECM and HFTO to fund Pre-FEEDs that look at addressing the challenges associated with implementing green technologies to decarbonizing industry and the site-specific and industry-specific challenges that are faced there.

So, just to conclude, we see the IEDO in general and EEII program specifically playing a leading role in industrial transformation. And just end with our vision for the future, which is a net-zero industrial emissions by 2050, sustainable transformation of the energy and emissions intensive industries that includes things like circularity, use of waste feedstocks such as CO2 and a real reduction in the impact that we have on the environment through our industrial manufacturing, improve energy and material efficiency—that's key even if we have carbon-free energy, we want to do everything that we can to reduce the amount of energy and resources that we use—and we want to position the United States to have a leadership position in clean manufacturing, engage in strong stakeholder partnerships and collaborations, and seek transformative technologies that are enabled by research development and demonstrations.

So, with that, I'll turn it back over to Zach. Thank you.

JOE CRESKO: And I will introduce Zach as the next speaker for the cross-sector technologies. The program manager for CST program, Isaac Chan's not available today so Zach is going to cover that as soon as he figures out how to switch back.

ZACH PRITCHARD: We're very close. We're very close. OK. Yeah, looks good. All right, great. So, thanks, Joe. As Joe said, I'm presenting here on behalf of my normal job as a technology manager and our cross-sector technology subprogram and presenting on behalf of Isaac Chan, the program manager.

Paul just talked about some really huge challenges, the most challenging industries to decarbonize. We might be left asking, is that the way to go? For every single industry, we'll go one by one, look at the challenges there and develop technologies needed for each industry. And I think one of the core goals of IEDO is to not leave us stuck in that position, right, where we have to look at every single process individually, every single piece of equipment, but to try to take a cross-sector approach where it's appropriate and where it can have an impact.

So, let's see. We have this plot here is the emissions from each sector as well as the primary energy use. And EEII program has their work cut out for them here in this top right corner. I think the [? CS key ?] program has even more work cut out for us because we can have an impact in those sectors, and we also have to think about all the rest of the industrial sector that doesn't fall within that handful of industries that the EEII program is focused on.

So, we know that industry is difficult to decarbonize that there's a huge diversity of products, processes, et cetera. But there are common end uses of energy that underpin all of these processes and products. So, one of the major areas that we've already heard about some today is process heating which we're addressing to the Industrial Heat Shot and through the cross-sector program.

But we can also think about auxiliary energy systems technologies like waste heat recovery and combined heat and power. Think about control systems. And as Avi mentioned, with NAWI, also water use and wastewater treatment. So, there are big challenges given the diversity of the sector, but we think we can find some cross-cutting themes.

So, the overall goal of the cross-sector program is to accelerate the readiness of energy and emissions reducing component systems and operational technologies that can have an impact on a broad range of industries. We look at industrializing low-carbon processing equipment. We have a strong, I would say, focus on equipment and component level technologies more so than a process angle like you would take looking at an individual industry.

The energy systems and control systems angle that I just mentioned, we're also really interested in what the next phase of really impactful industrial decarbonization technologies are going to be. So, things that are really transformative and that we need to bring from. Very low TRLs now to the point where they're at a proof of concept level.

And eventually, I think our office is fairly young, but I think long term, we see some kind of hand off almost between the NCSP program and the EEII program as cross-cutting technologies advanced to the point where we really all that's left are the hard integration challenges that are going to be very specific to individual applications and individual industries.

So, I mentioned the Industrial Heat Shot. A lot of the individual technology areas here are going to come up again later, but wanted to note for you that I think the CST program in IEDO has very, very strong alignment with the Heat Shot and really across our portfolio are working to address the challenges that the Heat Shot focuses on.

So, Joe earlier mentioned the different pathways within the Heat Shot. And we are looking within electrification at electro technologies for process heat at heat pumps at hybrid systems. We're thinking about combustion of low-carbon fuels, integration of renewable energy sources. We're thinking about the totally different approaches that require no heat at all or that can operate at very low temperatures as well as a strong thermal energy storage portfolio and some of the enabling technologies that can help industry decarbonize process heat.

Avi already covered I think a lot of great details about IEDO's approach to energy environmental justice. A couple of things that I'll call out maybe specifically with regard to the CST program. I think we have both the decarbonization technologies that we're focused on have a strong EEJ impact. And I think within decarbonization technologies we're pursuing, we are thinking about what the potential impact of adopting those technologies could be.

So, certainly, the focus on process heating has an important impact on industrial communities. We talk a lot about carbon emissions, but what is really affecting communities are the particulate emissions the NOx, other criteria air pollutants that come along with those carbon emissions. And decarbonizing industrial heat has a big impact there as well.

We also within our water portfolio have a focus on increasing access to safe drinking water. And like I was saying, really, I think there's an interesting angle for our program where we are thinking about, so if we have widespread availability of hydrogen, if facilities want to combust hydrogen for high temperature heat, what are the potential impacts of that? And we have to think about additional NOx generation that would come along with that and other considerations and that is all built into our work.

So, we will go to—so the program kind of divides itself into different areas. It's not as clean to do as if you just say the chemicals industry, the iron and steel industry, et cetera. So, these are categories that we group technologies into that we're working in and the following slides after this are going to go—

Well, so there have been a lot of slides with a lot of detail today. These are going to be more slides with a lot of detail, and I'm not going to talk about all of the detail. But it will be available to you to dig into more. But I just want to give kind of a flavor of the work we're doing across these different spaces.

So, first, within the thermal processes and systems portfolio. The major focus here is around electrification of process as well as hybrid systems for process heat. We are also looking at advanced furnace systems. And this is kind of flagship investment in this portfolio is the EPIXC Institute. But we also have a pretty big portfolio of RD&D projects that we've selected over the past couple of years.

And in particular, I'll highlight one area that we have been focusing on a lot and have solicited a lot of applications on and have a lot of great partners who are working in this space is around industrial heat pumps. So, I think many folks here are probably aware that industrial heat pumps are an excellent solution for low and maybe starting to edge into medium temperature process heating industry.

And our focus has been on expanding the application space that industrial heat pumps can access. So, that's been through increasing the temperature that can be delivered. It's been thinking about integration challenges that come along with highly customized systems and equipment that right now is often not manufactured in the United States. So, there's long wait times and folks have to get these shipped from overseas. As well as thinking about the direct emissions impact of refrigerants that are used.

Within the low-carbon fuels, feedstocks, and energy sources portfolio, we do some work on hydrogen combustion which I'll talk about in a second as well as a pretty strong legacy portfolio and combined heat and power that dates back to the advanced manufacturing office days. In particular, we've focused on flexible combined heat and power systems that can modulate the output of heat and power. And what we have been focused on more now going into the future is not just flexibility in the output but flexibility in the inputs.

So, in particular, around hydrogen combustion, I mentioned challenges around NOx generation. But in general, hydrogen combust differently from natural gas. And we have been finding work around the component systems, the sensors, the overall integrated systems that are needed to enable hydrogen combustion. And in particular, to think about working with blends of hydrogen and natural gas that can make the transition easier for industry to work with fuels that are available today but be able to transition to clean fuels as they become available in the future.

In the emerging technologies portfolio, I think this is a really fun area of the portfolio where we get to do a lot of—thought about what the next big things will be, thought about some of those low thermal budget technologies that can be really impactful. So, we are doing work right now in the membrane separation space. We're thinking about modeling, smart manufacturing approaches, control systems, and we'll also highlight thermal energy storage.

So, like I said, this is a pretty large area of our portfolio right now. And I think, generally, the public is very aware of energy storage as it applies to the grid and to the electricity system. But as facilities are decarbonizing and are interacting more using electrified process heat, they're interacting more with the grid in order to generate that as they're generating more heat on site, the flexibility that's provided by thermal energy storage starts to become more and more valuable. And so we're looking across a range of different technologies that will be of interest to industry.

I'm also going to very briefly touch on the water portfolio. We already mentioned the NAWI program which is the flagship program of our water work. But I think a couple really exciting things that are going on right now. Firstly, starting to look more at water treatment from agricultural and industrial sources.

So, historically, the program was really focused on municipal water and wastewater treatment and starting to think about the application to industry. And then we also just recently held a really I think successful workshop that was focused on understanding life cycle emissions, the direct emissions from water and wastewater treatment facilities on a life cycle basis and really attacking some of the data gaps there.

OK, so, we've all done ads for our funding. I will just very briefly wrap up by noting over the past couple of years, since IEDO has formed have made significant investments across the technology areas that I've talked about, including establishing a new manufacturing institute, and then we do in fact have FOA that is open right now that is in the review process focused on many of these areas that I already talked about.

So, I tried to recover some time. I do not know that I succeeded at that. But I will pull up the slides while showing this.

JOE CRESKO: So, being on time is fast.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Faster than perhaps the rest of us were.

JOE CRESKO: So, with that, we'll bring up Meegan Kelly who's going to cover our technical assistance and workforce development pillar. And Megan's stepping in for our program manager, Anne Hampson, who is on vacation. I don't know who has time for that, but—

MEEGAN KELLY: Thanks, Joe. All right. So, I'll give you an overview of our main efforts in the technical assistance and workforce space and try to share some of the underlying strategy and thought about how our programs are designed to really meet the needs of manufacturers.

So, in the technical assistance and workforce development space, our work is a little different from the other two RD&D oriented pillars that Paul and Zach talked about and that we're really focused on helping manufacturers with actions that they can take today and technologies that are available to them to deploy right now. So, we recognize that decarbonizing the industrial sector is going to require deployment of new technologies and processes and that manufacturers are going to need help managing these changes, planning for these changes, and implementing new technologies in ways that are cost effective for them.

Things are also moving at a fast pace. And employees in the plant need resources that can keep them up to date and informed on this transition so that they can learn about new technologies and get training on solutions that are available to them that they can take advantage of. Just want to flag before going to the next slide, we work hard to have a strong connection between the TA work and the RD&D space, and it's something that really benefits IEDO's partners.

The R&D portfolio works to demonstrate innovative technologies. And as they become ready for deployment, the TA team can pick up the baton and get to work on scaling up. So, that coordination and collaboration across our portfolios is important to us and I think important to our partners. I'll skip this slide.

We spoke to it earlier very well and focus in on a little bit more about how our subprogram is organized so we have three core programs that the majority of our budget is dedicated to—the onsite energy program, which includes our past work on CHP and also additional renewable energy and storage technologies, the better plans and better climate challenge program, which companies can join and commit to reaching ambitious targets and get assistance with meeting those targets, and then our energy management programs, which are all about developing an organizational culture around energy savings through implementation of energy management systems.

Across the bottom, there are lists of a number of smaller but very important initiatives that we also focus on. So, workforce, we have some initiatives focused primarily on ways to upskill workers in the industrial sector. We have an energy intensive pilot, which is focused on increasing our engagement with energy intensive industries who maybe have not historically engaged in our TA offerings. It includes a partnership with EPA that we're very excited about.

And then we have a technology validation program, validates the performance of emerging technologies after they're installed at participating sites. And a tools portfolio where we focus on maintaining a suite of open source software tools that facilities can use to do things like model their facilities, optimize or improve systems at their sites.

One thing that we are really focused on or thinking about a lot across all of those initiatives that I just talked about are kind of like leaning into ways that we can multiply our impact. So, while we may be working one-on-one with a specific partner or a specific site or maybe we're working with a cohort or a working group of facilities that are interested in one topic, in those cases, we really see our role as taking the lessons learned from those engagements and using them to inform all the other tools and resources, fact sheets that we make publicly available so that they can be relevant and available to all of industry.

It's a reality that we might not be able to individually touch of the hundreds of thousands of manufacturers, but that's why it's really important that the collaboration that we have with our partners works in a way that gets disseminated and made available to all of industry.

Another big strategy or thread that we've been focused on across all of our programs is how we integrate decarbonization. And I think the slide just helps ground us in the philosophy or way that we've been thinking about it in a three-stage way. So, first, we continue to focus on identifying opportunities to avoid the need to use energy or identify opportunities to use less energy, especially at times when it would have the greatest emissions benefits.

Then we're looking at identifying opportunities where we could pivot to lower carbon solutions, electrification opportunities, opportunities to install renewable energy, or switch to a lower carbon fuel. And then whatever is kind of left after that, or emissions for which there aren't any other options, they can be candidates for carbon capture pathways. And we've tried to apply this to our programs so you can see that the better plants program and the energy management program focus on that first bucket and are really rooted in providing solutions around efficiency.

The onsite energy program and CHP touch that second bucket. And then the better climate challenges is more comprehensive and spans both areas of opportunity. We're not currently doing much direct TA in the carbon capture space. At this point in time, I think more in the scope of other offices, but we are considering the full spectrum of decarbonization pathways when we think about what we can do in the workforce.

OK, I have just one slide on each of the three main programs, and I'm going to be able to I think make up time here. But I just want to give you a quick sense of what these big programs are about. First, better plans and better climate challenge. Better climate challenge was launched in 2021.

And industrial organizations are welcome to join the program. They sign an agreement and commit to achieving a GHG emissions reduction goal, which is which is a lot. 50% of savings over a 10-year period. And that one was really like built upon the foundation of a longer standing better plans program which we've been running since 2011. Partners have a target associated with an energy intensity reduction rather than GHG.

And the benefit of joining these programs after you agree to be a partner is getting access to the national labs, getting data tracking support to see how you're doing and reaching your goals, and receiving recognition from the Department of Energy for your achievements. Like Avi mentioned, 14% of the manufacturing footprint in these programs, there's almost 300 partners right now covering over 3,000 facilities. And those companies have really saved a lot of energy and money and lowered their CO2.

The onsite energy program is a second one I talked about. And as Avi mentioned, this one was just launched at the beginning of this year. It's designed to provide no cost technical assistance, market analysis, best practices, ways that could help industrial facilities and other large users explore their options to adopt clean energy technologies install them right onsite in their facilities.

We've historically supported deployment of technologies like CHP and waste to power and district energy. And just in the last year, we expanded our efforts to add more work on technologies like renewables and storage. So, some of these technologies on the slide have been around for a long time but still need some deployment support. Others, companies are just starting to think about and maybe have less experience with.

Storage has been a big one in the last six months and the things that our partners are asking about. And they generally maybe need a little support figuring out of how to get started. And that's one of the things that this program is good at.

So, we operate a network of regional technical assistance partnerships or taps. There are 10 of them located across the country, and they work directly with sites to help them explore their options. They also engage with utilities and policy makers to help address some of the market barriers and challenges to deploying distributed resources, which I think can be sometimes harder than maybe the technical challenges.

Finally, energy management programs—they build off the international energy management standard known as ISO 50001 to create a culture of continuous improvement. We support the superior energy performance program, the 50001 ready program. Companies that participate in these have demonstrated year over year energy improvements far more savings than business as usual across the industry average.

Even more savings actually than many better plans partners achieve at least the ones that haven't implemented energy management systems. And also, a cool thing about this work is in partnership with LBNL, we developed a 50001 navigator tool where companies complete a set of tasks within the tool that are aligned to the standard. They measure their performance, and they receive recognition from DOE for their savings.

One to summarize some of our recent efforts to integrate EEEJ in our programs. And this is another one of those kind of overarching strategies like multiplying our impact and integrating decarbonization. We're really working to ensure that we're thinking about incorporating EEEJ across our portfolio.

And this slide just highlights some of the efforts. Like the three main programs I talked about are on the left side of the slide. And maybe I'll just flag a couple quick examples. So, we're prioritizing providing training to facilities that are located in disadvantaged communities through better plants. Also thinking about developing a recognition structure for better plants partners that are prioritizing their relationships with communities.

For onsite energy, the TAPs are going to be working in their first year to identify disadvantaged communities in their region, and then put together a plan for how to engage with them. That's a new thing. They'll submit the plan to DOE, and we'll work with them on it. They'll also participate in DEIA and EEEJ trainings provided by subject matter experts to increase the TAPs understanding of these spaces which are which are new for many of them.

We're also working to increase stakeholder engagement opportunities that emphasize communities. And I'll just talk about the photo real quick on this slide, which is from last summer when our office participated with MESC in a roundtable in Detroit that was hosted by a community benefit organization called Focus Hope. And together, we explored ways that manufacturers and communities could work together.

And this is my last slide. I wanted to leave you with a reiteration I guess of our highest priorities when we look ahead in the near term. These are the things that we're laser focused on achieving—expanding the better climate challenge, implementing the new onsite energy program to increase deployment of renewables and storage, increasing our work with energy intensive manufacturers, upskilling the manufacturing workforce, incorporating DEIA and EEEJ into all of our programs, and continuing to be that connector or navigator—I can't remember what Kelly called it this morning—for manufacturers to be able to find opportunities within DEO that they can they can benefit from.

We have some other ideas for new things that we'd like to put more effort into noted on this slide. And I think I think I'll just stop there. And thank you, the committee, for your willingness to do this work and the opportunity to share about our program today.

JOE CRESKO: Thanks, Meegan. That was great. So, I'd like to thank all the speakers—Avi, Paul, who I think is still on line, Zach and Megan. And we are coming close to getting a little back on track if we limit our questions. We see how this goes before we go into the next lightning talk, so. Sorry. There.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. Thanks for the great presentations. Maybe this question is directed at Meegan. Maybe it's for all of you. So, we talked a little bit this morning about the importance of efficiency. I mean, I think Joe you mentioned that even if we dial up to best available practices, it only gets a third of the way there. However, it is a third of the mitigation space, and it's what we're relying on as a stopgap.

So, I'm wondering, the DOE has done great work. Energy Star has done great work. What do you think is really needed to supercharge efficiency savings? Do you feel like you've captured a lot of that in your new programmatic elements? Are there new barriers you're going after? Because it feels like we there's always an enormous amount of efficiency potential left, and we really need to make sure we tap all of it. So, sorry that's kind of a grand level question, but maybe you could elaborate a bit.

MEEGAN KELLY: Energy efficiency, the best I think—

AUDIENCE: First rule, right?

MEEGAN KELLY: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we really have had to think about decarbonization and energy efficiency together, not at the expense of one or the other. I don't think we've captured all of the low hanging fruit in the energy efficiency space. I think there's more. And we have to continue to prioritize it.

AUDIENCE: Maybe I can ask that a little differently. So, what's different, I guess, new and different. You've presented a lot of new different things. I'm just eager to hear how maybe there's more gain. Some of those gains that we haven't been able to tap in the past. If you're particularly excited about some of the aspects that will go after those gains that have been stubbornly there for a long time.

MEEGAN KELLY: The first thing, at least in our space—and welcome, Joe, to comment on this, too—has a lot to do with workforce. There's a lot more sophisticated and well thought out training for more kinds of facilities that are participating in the better plans program which is really where the best efficiency work happens.

We've started doing these things called boot camps. There are in-plant trainings where we actually go around and touch things and point out savings opportunities in the facilities. And I think those have really ramped up and gotten a lot more interest and participation in the last couple of years.

ZACH PRITCHARD: I could see Avi itching to say something, too, from his seat, so.

AVI SHULTZ: Maybe I'll just be very quick. I think to the broader question about how efficiency fits into our portfolio, I think you're hearing from Meegan because in terms of the timescales that we're talking about with the impact that RD&D can have on the commercial sector, I think those programs inherently have to look a little bit further afield to what is it, skating to where the hockey puck, is going to be instead of where it is.

So, the near term efficiency gains are going to be in that tech assistance portfolio, which is not to say that an RD&D portfolio, when we're talking about integration of carbon-free resources, we know in a lot of cases they're going to be differences in cost structures and availability and utilizing those energy sources efficiently is a critical part of developing those technologies.

So, I would say in the RD&D portfolio, it's more that energy efficiency is engaged from the very beginning of technology scoping to make sure that these are the material and energy efficient technologies that we want to be putting our efforts into.

JOE CRESKO: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, intentional efficiency from the beginning for emerging technologies efficiency, at all, scales efficiency across supply chains. We think we've thought about and worked a lot at facility scale. And I think the issues of efficiency are brought to that. But really fundamental. And you're right. I think one third is one third. That's a lot. That's not something to just pass by.

And I think another interesting question that we have to deal with is decarbonizing. You could imagine with carbon-free sources of energy. Do we tolerate more energy demand if it decarbonizes? What does that balance look like? And I think these are not easy questions to address.

But yes, I think there's a lot to do here. We've been doing these programs for a long time, but some of the low hanging fruit may be out there, but some of the fruit that's way higher is a bit higher and is they're big fruits and, they're may be hard to shake the tree and maybe they drop, maybe you have to go after them. [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: She alluded to—Meegan, thank you for mentioning the energy intensive work. That work is getting at the point of there's still a lot out there that we haven't even touched. So, rolling out more chemical sectors is a good example. There's some coordination work going on in chloralkali for example. There's a bunch of other sectors that are in the queue. So, there's always work and more to be done. And when we turn over a rock, it's interesting what we find.

ZACH PRITCHARD: [INAUDIBLE]. Go ahead.

NEAL ELLIOTT: Say, Mike, I'm going to observe, push a little bit on a question Eric asked. Is there something new in the efficiency space? And I say that coming from a week at Electrification 2024 down in Savannah with [INAUDIBLE] and the utilities down there are facing a resource adequacy crisis right now.

JOE CRESKO: Wow.

NEAL ELLIOTT: Denominated in tens of gigawatts. And so for them, they're starting to think about energy efficiency as a way of freeing up capacity to meet electrification demands from their customers. There was a lot of discussion, a lot of interest in thinking about maybe more systems efficiency rather than just focusing on efficiency the way that I think EMO, IEDO has historically, and no offense, [INAUDIBLE], but energy storage is thinking about. Is there another layer or another level of efficiency that we can attempt to tap?

JOE CRESKO: Yeah, and we need to—I mean, there are certain things that are on the horizon that are coming fast that the data center issues some of the things that were brought up this morning that are a real challenge and the utilities are seeing this and what does the future look like and how do we anticipate and work on that and the 2 to 3 or 4% of our electricity demand going to these.

We've heard for a while, oh, this is going to grow very rapidly. But they were inefficient. And now, they're really actually quite efficient, and we are coming up to a point where these systems issues are, yes, they're going to [INAUDIBLE] and do you want to say—

AVI SHULTZ: Yeah, I'll just be very quick here to say that you're absolutely right, Neal, and I think we completely agree with you. And this is an area of our portfolio that we anticipate growing substantially in the future. I think we alluded a little bit in our CST portfolio to industrial load flexibility. But I think that probably didn't talk about it relative to the importance that it's going to have going forward.

I think there's a huge, huge, huge untapped potential in industrial load flexibility precisely to match those growing energy constraints that we're going to have going forward. And actually, both Meegan and Zach have been very engaged in a lot of our thinking. And I don't know if there's anything specifically either of you want to add.

MEEGAN KELLY: We read your paper that came out a couple of weeks ago on exactly this topic among lots of other things that we're really trying to focus on and prioritize and build space to work on. Yeah.

JOE CRESKO: Yeah, and I think you heard the term energy storage. And I think energy storage is from all other is one part of it is energy conversion and storage and manipulation in ways that are extremely efficient for an evolving grid, for evolving industrial sector for the economy.

MEEGAN KELLY: Sure.

JOE CRESKO: Oh, [INAUDIBLE]. I'm sorry. I didn't see anything over here. [INAUDIBLE] we go over [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: So, I guess just one comment. I think the energy efficiency problem is interesting. If you take high temperature processes, many of them in steel plants, most of the energy is recovered and used elsewhere. So, it's not that it's completely wasted. It's almost not wasted at all. So, energy efficiency may lead to more electric power requirements, which may not make sense economically in the end. So, it's something to consider.

But I have a question. I thought it's really cool how you're kind of looking at all the different parts of the value of the debt. And your office is really addressing all of those. I was thinking of national labs and your HPC for manufacturing program. Does that have a role in this as well in terms of modeling, scale up, and things like that?

AVI SHULTZ: So, maybe let me take the national lab piece of it first, which is the answer is, yes, absolutely have a role and a critical role in all parts of our portfolio. So, we can talk about a bit about how the national labs are the backbone with a large portion of our technical assistance portfolio. But in our RD&D work as well, I'll say this is another area where we anticipate growing our office as a relatively new office.

And of course, is a growing priority in DOE, we don't necessarily have the national lab infrastructure built out as we do for I'll say legacy priorities of DOE. This is something that we anticipate growing in the future. And then, sorry, what was the—

AUDIENCE: The HPC.

AVI SHULTZ: HPC. Do you want to take that, Zach? Yeah.

ZACH PRITCHARD: I lead the HPC work out of—just, I mean, briefly, we'll say, I think there absolutely is a role to play there. I think one of the challenges that we've seen is that compared to the kind of AMMTO side of the HPC portfolio, there's a lot less awareness among the industrial decarbonization community of the kinds of problems HPC can solve and kind of just that the opportunity that's there.

And so it's something that we're working on. The program fundamentally is kind of a teaming program. It connects manufacturers with the experts at national labs with the HPC resources. And I think that's going to be really critical to build those connections. So, that those HPC problems are on the radar of people in industry because we're not quite there yet.

JOE CRESKO: Sasha, you want to—

SASHA STASHWICK: Do we have time?

JOE CRESKO: Sure, go ahead.

SASHA STASHWICK: I might take this in a little bit of a different direction. I'm aware that LPO has now outreach to states to help it sort of expand its reach. And I'm wondering if, at your level, you're also thinking about states as potentially like aggregators of—I heard you say that like cohorts of facilities that might be good adopters of some of these cross-cutting technologies. And I hear this like throughline throughout the entire day of just trying to reach more audiences faster.

And just if you could speak to the extent to which you're trying to work with states to do that.

AVI SHULTZ: [INAUDIBLE] actually to hand it over to Meegan because I think you're absolutely right, Sasha. And I think explicitly, one of the strategies in our tech assistance portfolio that we're growing, we're attempting to grow and make more explicit is turning that very public stakeholder engagement function of our tech assistance portfolio into a gateway for our entire office as a whole into the broader technology options we're developing. So, Meegan, yeah.

MEEGAN KELLY: I'll just add, something you might think is interesting we've been doing for the last two years is funding a state industrial working group through NASEO, the National Association of State Energy Officials. There are maybe about 15 states that have expressed interest in meeting somewhat regularly to talk about industrial related topics, including decarbonization planning, but also other things like economic development.

And that's been an important way for DOE, but also other federal agencies that we partner with [INAUDIBLE] and EPA and others that are working in this space to share what's available and use the place where the states are and their stakeholders as a way to continue to build awareness of what options are out there.

JOE CRESKO: Let's take one more question, and we'll jump to the lightning topic.

ANNA FENDLEY: Sure, and it's Anna for the wonderful people doing the transcript. So, unsurprisingly, I wanted to raise workers because I think that is distinct from the community engagement that you've described. And I think this was a really helpful overview.

You talked about some resources that you have for workers. But I'm wondering more about how your seeking knowledge from workers. And I'll give the example. Engineers are fantastic. They figure out how something is supposed to work.

But once it's in place, the people who do the maintenance or who run the equipment are going to be able to tell you if it dramatically changes the job, if the change eats through pipe faster. And so I guess I'm wondering know broadly but also specifically in the technical assistance work or onsite programs if that is a routine thing that happens. And if not, how that could become routine across the board?

AVI SHULTZ: Yeah, maybe I can start with that. I mean, it's like you sit in our meetings and hear what we talk about. Again, I mentioned it a little bit this morning why we think it's so essential to have industry partners on our research projects because we are all extremely familiar with the phenomenon of not to cast aspersions on any of our academic colleagues.

But professors in academic research, sitting down, mapping out a plan and actually learning what that looks like in terms of implementing it on the factory floor. It's beyond just getting cost, numbers, from industry partners. It's understanding, getting their staff to actually review the technologies, to actually review the process diagrams that our researchers are drawing up, actually working with their staff exactly to describe, and say, OK let's actually put together a realistic scenario of what this looks like, and let's actually build it.

I mean, so that's why we do pilot scale demonstrations. That's the point of working with [INAUDIBLE] to actually do the commercial scale demonstrations because we know there's a lot of technical risk still in the project when we haven't actually deployed it on the factory floor. So, 100%, and then I don't know if you want to add anything about how our [INAUDIBLE] technical assistance side of it.

MEEGAN KELLY: Yeah, the thing I think we're most excited about and interested in the workforce space right now beyond what we already do, which is ensuring that workers are stakeholders at the table when we're designing resources and their perspective is included. But we're developing a what's called a consortium now. It's called a collaborative so I got to get it right, where we'll be selecting or working with three to five organizations that are focused on workforce to scale up what they're already doing really well as opposed to coming up with something new and different.

We think that there's a lot of disparate workforce related, efforts happening, and if we could identify a handful that just need a little time and attention to get a little bigger and deeper, that would be a good role for our TA investments.

JOE CRESKO: Yeah, OK, we're learning from past investments, our manufacturing innovation institutes. We just stood up the seventh one and a really very strong focus there on workforce development. So, yes, there are things out there and doing it better. And that means us, too, as well, doing things better. I think with that, we should move along. Thanks, everybody, for this session and turn it back to Zach.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Yep, so the IEDO presentations were the first part of our afternoon full of office specific information being presented. So, the rest of the afternoon is going to be dedicated to lightning talks from offices around DOE that work in the industrial decarbonization space. I will share my screen here so that—let's see.

Here we go. All right, so this first block of lightning talks are going to be EERE offices, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, within DOE. We will first hear from Diana Bauer, who's the deputy director of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, our sister office I would say, our former compatriots in AMO.

And then we will hear from the Solar Energy Technologies Office, the Hydrogen Fuel Cells Technology Office, and the Bioenergy Technologies Office. But I'll introduce them as they come. So, Diana, the floor is yours.

DIANA BAUER: This microphone is really loud. I hope people are not getting too overwhelmed. Yeah, so, thank you so much, Zach. And it's a pleasure to see a number of familiar faces on the panel. And so delighted that you're here to give feedback on really important area.

As Zach mentioned AMMTO was joined with IEDO until October of 2022. And so we come from the same roots. We are doing complementary work, but there are also a number of connection points, which I'll go through here.

So, basically, our focus is on manufacturing energy—or manufacturing technologies for the clean energy transition. So, we're thinking about the intersection of the transformation of energy and the transformation of manufacturing. So, advanced manufacturing for advanced energy. And in terms of our mission, people are really central and innovation and transformation. And you can see innovation ecosystems, education and workforce development, and DEIA.

So, these are some of the areas where we're focusing, including batteries and storage, wind turbines and wind blades, hydropower components, castings and forgings, industrial motors, electronics of various types. And in general, we're interested in platform technology. So, technologies that can apply across multiple manufacturing technologies that can apply across multiple end use technologies. Advanced materials, we have quite a bit of work that's translating scientific innovation into manufacturable materials for the energy economy. And we're also quite engaged in workforce, as I mentioned.

So, I'm just going to go through some of our areas that are touch points here. One is smart manufacturing. We have the [INAUDIBLE], which is the Smart Manufacturing Institute. And also, we were tasked by Congress with supporting the national academies to do a report on options for a national plan for smart manufacturing.

And now, we're in the process of digesting this plan and developing a plan for AMMTO and developing also a plan for the government wide advances in smart manufacturing. And so we're trying to balance both efficiency, and multi scale efficiency, and then also smart manufacturing for competitiveness, quality, et cetera.

Another quite big area for AMMTO is critical materials. AMMTO led the development of the critical materials assessment report that underpinned the department's determination of critical materials last year. We also have launched the critical materials collaborative which is a large community of programs and performers that are working to accelerate the path from innovation to commercialization.

What I have below here on the bottom of the slide is the topics for a FOA that we released in the fall related to—it was called the critical materials accelerator FOA. Are you guys getting the messages? Well, maybe after we're finished, we can turn that off.

So, another area is called BOTTLE, which is a lab-led consortium. And it's focused on circularity of plastics. And certainly, if we think about embedded energy, circularity and reduction of energy use plastics is very important. And of course, there's all sorts of other health effects that also can be addressed by doing this well.

Also, in the circular economy area, we have two prizes that are currently under competition. One is a Re-X before recycling prize. So, that's looking at opportunities communities to reuse, remanufacture, recondition rather than just going into grinding and recycling the materials. And the other one is the E-SCRAP prize, which is looking at recovering critical materials from electronics scrap.

Now, I will say for both of these, the reason why we're doing prizes rather than conventional FOAs is that we want to bring in a more diverse set of stakeholders into grappling with these issues. Oftentimes, it's communities, small business. We want to try to catalyze networking that maybe doesn't happen through our FOAs.

So, I just have returned to this slide that I had at the beginning because I also want to make the point that along the lines of what we were talking about earlier with data centers, and the increased electrification, and the stress on electric vehicles, et cetera, the stress on the grid, some of our areas of focus are really important for that so industrial motors, high efficiency conductors, power electronics. We're looking at both high performance, power electronics, power electronics that can handle high voltage as well as energy efficient power electronics, also, energy efficient microelectronics.

So, as we're thinking about those system, increasing scale of system, these innovations are going to be really important. And I think that's it. So, this is our leadership team, and I welcome any outreach to any of them if folks are interested. Thank you.

ZACH PRITCHARD: All right. Thank you, Diana. And Diana will rejoin us in a few minutes for the Q&A. Up next, we have Kamala Raghavan, who is a technology manager in the Solar Energy Technologies Office. And she focuses on concentrating solar thermal power. Here we go.

KAMALA RAGHAVAN: Thank you, Zach. Hello, all. Good meeting you all on this platform. I'm Kamala. I belong to a specific office, Concentrating Solar Thermal Power Office within Solar Energy Technologies Office.

So, today, I'll be mostly focusing on a particular technology, introduce the technology quickly, and provide some updates and status on where we are in terms of addressing the decarbonization challenge. So, this is a quick introduction to the technology and status of this technology. CSP started as a power, address to address, the electrification, and power needs using renewable energies.

Now, we are focusing on decarbonization. So, essentially, the goal was for power industry to achieve $0.05 per kilowatt hour with a certain amount of—or certain number of hours of thermal energy storage. And efficiencies, this is like electrical efficiency of 50% thermal to electric power conversion.

So, that was the goal. And so far, where this particular industry is in terms of commercially getting adopted is there are at least 1.7 GW of CSP employed within the US and 6.3 globally. And there are several modalities or several ways of capturing sunlight from troughs to tower technology. And 5.1 GW of global deployment is parabolic trough, and 1.2 GW is tower.

You can see the two pictures here. The leftmost, bottom leftmost is the trough technology, and the center one is the tower technology, where you have a field of mirrors or heliostats that concentrates the solar flux onto a tower where the solar flux is converted into heat energy. And then that heat energy is transported to a power block where thermal energy then is converted using turbines, the well-known method to electricity.

So, this is power based application for CSP. Now, several of this technology can be directly ported to decarbonization. It's like the receiving of solar flux, concentrating the flux converting it to thermal energy, storing the thermal energy, and using that particular thermal energy for providing heat to the industrial processes.

That's what is described in this. This is a very, very rudimentary sketch here. If you can see this, this gray box is what represents the conventional fossil fuels providing process to the industrial reactions. Now, if we want to replace that with concentrated thermal solar thermal energy, what do we do? We use sun's flux, and we can do two things.

We can directly use solar flux to heat the reaction, and hence, providing process heat to all the industrial reactions and get all the outputs required. The other way of doing it is capturing the solar flux, converting it to thermal energy, and storing it as a thermal energy storage in the thermal energy storage, and then retrieving that thermal energy, and providing heat input to the industrial reactions.

So, there are two things here. So, CSP as a technology can be used for directly providing process heat. And we are also focused on thermal energy storage in this regard.

What are the priority research areas? One thing is like we have to hit the cost of roughly $0.02 cents per kilowatt thermal to meet the competition with natural gas. This is a very, very broad analysis that we have done. It might be we are engaging with the industries to figure out whether this can be like much more drilled down, and we can figure out the levelized cost of heat or the cost competitiveness with different sectors.

One thing we also need to do is continuously improve the thermal efficiency of solar thermal coupled processes. That's another priority research area. Like I said, we are focused on developing good thermal energy storage solutions, and then like using that for getting solar fuels and chemical commodities. One of the goals for SETO is to define system concepts, define the key components for solar process, solar thermal process heat for carbon emission intensive industries. These are some of the goals.

Again, here, you have heard since morning, I didn't put too many charts here from the industrial decarbonization roadmap. I only talked here about what are those thermally-driven industrial processes that CSP can potentially address? It's actually like, oh, so you saw the charts where different industrial sectors requiring, say, temperatures as low as 80 Celsius and temperature as high as 1,100 Celsius.

So, the [? CSP ?] technology can provide heat to all of these industrial sectors. Shown here is like the right side, which is a very mature technology which is a trough technology deployed across the world. This can be deployed for low temperature processes less than 400C. And the tower technology can be deployed for 700C and beyond. So, we are investing a lot of—investing in a lot of research development and demonstration projects for high temperature process heat industry.

Now, I will get to some examples in terms of where we are, how far have we come in terms of either adoption or penetrating the market? This is like one of the first effort that is a success story for us. Sorry. Here, essentially, this project was focused on producing solar steam. And then this team was stored as in the steam accumulator as thermal energy storage.

And now, this particular energy storage system or the steam accumulator has been installed in a commercial facility to produce di-methyl ether. So, this is one of the success stories, and this happened just two weeks ago. So, this is how like CSP can have a great impact towards decarbonization goals.

The other one is solar desalination. This is another success story we have had. This started in 2017. There were two main efforts or initiatives. One was congressionally-driven desalination prize. And the other was one of our solar desalination projects. So, the prize is ongoing. I think we are on the third phase or fourth phase of the prize where we have, we are identifying the last few finalists for desalination project.

The other one, which I have already like—it's on demonstration, is the Hawaii Solar Desalination Project. This is already implemented. And then for the forward osmosis process and the test and demonstration is already ongoing. So, these are the two low temperature process heat applications that has been proven.

In terms of high temperature processes, this is when—I would say we started looking into the high temperature process industries sometime in 2021 where we had a FOA which started looking into components that were required that are required majorly for high temperature processes. That was the solar reactors and receivers FOA where we awarded a few projects for developing high temperature reactors, receiver reactors for industrial decarbonization.

I will talk about a little bit about—probably with the time constraint, I'll just quickly mention some of the projects. These are the two projects we have funded. One is solar thermochemical ammonia production.

On this project, this is like a low TRL chemistry project where the project is on developing reactors for a novel ammonia process. Instead of can we have a process different than Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia? So, that's one project.

And the other one is again cement. On this project, we are developing a reactor where there will be like a better solar thermal absorption and convert carbon dioxide and water instead of the carbon dioxide produced during the reaction and use that carbon dioxide for cement production. So, these are the clinker formation. So, these are the two projects that we are running for high temperature processes.

The other important aspect is for any of these high temperature processes, we need a novel materials. We are looking at developing novel materials and components with novel materials, especially for concentrating solar thermal power, we need a special component which is the receiver or receiver reactor.

We are focused on developing some of these components for high temperature industrial processes. And these will be directly either on sun reactors or like off sun reactors where you can pull the heat from the thermal energy storage. So, these were the main points I wanted to discuss. So, that's my last slide. Thank you.

ZACH PRITCHARD: Thank you so much, Kamala. Up next, we're going to hear from Tomas Green. Tomas is a technology manager in the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Technologies Office. And I will pull these slides up. Tomas.

TOMAS GREEN: Hi, everyone. My name is Tomas Green. I'm a technology manager in the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office. It's great to see a lot of familiar faces and meet a lot of new folks through this engagement. I lead our industrial decarbonization portfolio, which, admittedly, is pretty small in the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Office. I came to HFTO you about two years ago.

And, originally, as a chemical engineer, I was really fascinated in this divide I saw between technology and policy and people who are figuring out these solutions. And I came to the Hydrogen Office because I saw hydrogen as one of those technologies that's really hard to get right. And we've had a lot of conversations in HFTO and as part of the Department of Energy, thinking about what is the right role for hydrogen to play in our decarbonization space?

And we have evolved over the last few years. We were entirely focused on light duty transportation for a long time in our office's history. And we've broadened out since to focus more on things like industrial decarbonization as one of the key focuses of our technology. So, this portfolio is growing, and I'm going to walk through some examples of what we've been able to fund and invest in so far. And would love conversations about where to take this next.

So, this is our overall vision for the role that hydrogen can play in the economy. This is our H2@Scale vision. And this is what we call our Swiss army knife graphic. Maybe some of you have seen it before. But hydrogen can be flexible, in that it can be produced from a lot of different energy resources, can be converted in different ways, transported in different ways, and used for a variety of different end sources.

We'll start by talking about what we're investing in the industrial and chemical space. This graphic is from our national strategy and roadmap, which when I first came in as a fellow to DOE, I helped us to develop. This is our demand curve that we've projected. It's a net-zero scenario. So, think about the role hydrogen plays in net-zero by 2050 scenario. This is about the demand curve that we approximate for the different end uses that hydrogen will play a key and strategic role in out into that year.

In the industrial space, we focus on these steel decarbonizing the existing blast furnace suite as well as teeing up potential export markets. Ammonia, where hydrogen is already used today to produce ammonia and switching that supply over to something clean. Methanol, which is a similar story as ammonia, already a critical feedstock today. And then high temperature industrial heat, so this isn't necessarily widespread blending into natural gas networks. This is really targeting hydrogen for those heat needs that's over 500C.

In this space, we're investing a lot in steel. We have two active projects. One, of course, funded with Sridhar. And the one on the left, the Missouri Science and Technologies grid interactive steel making with hydrogen initiative or GISH. This has built a pilot reactor.

TOMAS GREEN: And to reduce iron ore. And has gotten some really interesting learnings from it. We've completed, I think, about three pilot campaigns so far producing over a ton of iron ore reduced with hydrogen in about a week's time. And we're also developing techno-economic analysis on this process. And really, finally, honing the kinetics and melting properties of these iron ores.

The second is with University of California, Irvine. This is looking at thermal integration with high temperature electrolysis systems. So, a solid oxide electrolyzer can use the heat from an industrial process and make hydrogen at much lower electrical input. So, much greater energy efficiency for this process. So, they've demonstrated this out on a sort of testbed scale.

We just picked up two projects. And it's been really great collaborating with IEDO. We pulled these from the fiscal year '22 FOA with Avi and Paul, and others. We've been strengthening the collaboration between hydrogen fuel cells and the Industrial Decarbonization Office. The one on the left here, Molten Industries, they are a startup based in Oakland, California.

And similar to the UC Irvine project, they're looking at thermal integration again but with a pyrolysis system. So, this is where you make hydrogen in the absence of oxygen and you get carbon black and hydrogen from that process. So, it's a high-heat process, but they're looking at injecting that hydrogen while hot into a shaft furnace.

And also using that solid carbon you get for the carburization process for steel. So, we're really excited about that. And then the other one is another startup in the Houston area, Hertha Metals. And they're looking at an innovative high heat process for reducing iron ore. And their real innovation is that you would not need a high grade of iron ore, like you do for hydrogen-based direct reduction. But they can use a lower grade of ores, so, if one cuts down on energy intensity upstream, so the pelletization and the processing of the ore before it gets to the reactor that can get reduced. And then you can have a wider range of ore quality as well. They're also both of these projects are building demo scale plants.

And then we just announced an award as part of IEDO's fiscal year '23 FOA. And this is an expansion of the project that we funded with UC Irvine. They're doing a demonstration of a high-temperature electrolysis unit at Cleveland-Cliffs Toledo, Ohio facility. And so it's taking the direct thermal energy from this furnace. Will be plugging it into an electrolyzer and seeing if you can do this in a real world facility.

It's trying out whether this can work on full scale. And I think it will be really instructive for us for not just steel industries but for other high-temperature industries that might be using hydrogen, like ammonia, methanol. Where if you can thermally integrate an electrolyzer in this way, you can potentially make hydrogen with much, much lower energy input.

We also have a really cool modeling project. It's called Green Heart or the Green Steel Project. It's ... A team at NREL is working at this. And we've had a lot of questions asked, like: What is the impact of 45 V, the hydrogen production tax credit on these high-energy intensive industries that might be able to use hydrogen? And so, they're looking at: OK. What if you could go off grid and potentially avoid the delays of getting grid interconnection, be able to make your hydrogen using low cost renewables, potentially store that hydrogen somewhere on site if you have geologic hydrogen storage that's the cheapest possible? And then how can you plug that into an industrial facility? Iron, iron steel, ammonia, etc.

So, nobody is doing this modeling yet. And it's been increasingly important because of the tax credits. And so some preliminary results we've seen from this project is that off-grid facilities, such as in West Texas, where you have low cost renewables and geologic hydrogen storage potential can see low levelized cost of hydrogen that can unlock some of these industrial end uses.

So, we could see steel produced in a facility like this in these areas being competitive with incumbent technologies. So, excited to … This is still kind of an early, early-days project. It's about … They're about a year into their work. So, we'll be seeing a lot more from this in the future. Just quickly, some of our work on the transportation sector. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles is that strategic segment of the market that we're targeting.

Battery Electric is really taking over light duty vehicles because people can have a charger at their home. It's a lot harder to get a hydrogen pump at your apartment. But the medium- and heavy-duty vehicles is really what we're focusing on as well as developing staff. So, all staff production will have some amount of hydrogen input that goes into it just to take the biomass and turn it into something that you can put into a jet engine. That it has the chemical properties that can refine those products. So, you would need some hydrogen for meeting our staff targets.

We have three projects going on as part of the SuperTruck program. With Daimler, we are demonstrating two Class 8 trucks that will have 600-mile range with a liquid hydrogen storage. So, that's a super-cooled hydrogen—liquid hydrogen storage on board. And GM and Ford are demonstrating some medium-duty vehicles as well.

Of course, the hydrogen hubs fit into all of this. It’s, of course, run by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. But in these hubs, you'll see examples of staff production of industrial decarburization of heavy-duty import infrastructure decarburization, the transportation space. So, a lot of this is also going to be demonstrated in each of these hubs. Thank you so much.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: So, this … Our last presenter before we do the Q&A for this section is Gayle Bentley. And she is going to be joining us virtually. So, Gayle is a technology manager for conversion technologies in the Bioenergy Technologies Office. OK, great. I see her presentation is up. And I see Gayle's face. So, we'll hand it over to Gayle.

GAYLE BENTLEY: Great. Thanks, Zachary. Thanks for the invitation for speaking today. I want to apologize that I'm here virtually. I am stationed at the Golden Field Office. My office is on the NREL campus. Although, as you can see my blurry background, I'm just working from home today. But I'm glad that I'm able to speak even though I'm joining in a virtual capacity. Next slide, please.

So, I'd like to start with a brief introduction in terms of the kind of high-level approach that the Bioenergy Technologies Office takes. BETO has historically focused on making fuels and chemical products from renewable resources. And in the past, that has mostly been focused on biomass feedstocks.

And as you can see in the kind of schematic figure shown here, we take a wide range of conversion technologies to take these renewable resources whether they're biomass, whether they're CO₂, whether they're other greenhouse gases, we've recently worked with different kinds of waste resource streams other than waste biomass things like municipal solid waste, things like plastics.

And then feeding those all through what we would call a biorefinery to convert those dispersed heterogeneous feedstocks into the products that we're interested in. And as you can see, we're interested in a few categories of products, those being fuels bioproducts in terms of biochemicals and biopower.

We've also focused on opportunities to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions across all of the process steps included in a bio refinery. And so I'll be talking with you today mostly on our focus relating to industrial decarburization. But as you can see, we have wide reaching decarburization potential across multiple sectors.

And I think the main thing to keep in mind here is what BETO is ultimately trying to do is to replace fossil fuels that we're currently dependent on as well as replace petrochemicals that we're currently dependent on. And especially in a decarburized future, there are still many materials and chemicals that we'll rely on even if let's say transportation sectors is completely electrified or completely moving on hydrogen. Next slide.

So, to frame some of these goals, I'm just going to briefly note here that BETO produces a multiyear program plan that outlines all of the high-level objectives that we seek to achieve and to just show that here that we have three main strategic goals. And those are around decarburization of three different sectors, transportation, industry, and communities.

I'm not going to go into detail here. But I would encourage anyone who's interested in learning more about BETO's R&D programs to look through this MYPP. It's designed to be a fairly high level. It's not too terribly long, a fairly accessible document to get kind of an overview of how BETO has historically invested in these kinds of technologies to achieve very ambitious decarburization outcomes. Next slide.

So, to focus in on our emphasis on decarburization of industry, I just wanted to zoom in and reorient everyone to the motivation here. I know that this is a very sympathetic crowd and understands the justification for this. But our approach to decarburization of industry is really focused on the impact that chemicals in particular have on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the industrial sector.

So, you can see of the industrial sector which is already a pretty significant portion of our overall CO2 emissions bulk chemicals represent a very large fraction. So, what is BETO going to do about that? We have a wide range of technologies that we've developed over the years that are really well positioned to help produce these sustainable chemicals materials and improved processes in a way that can achieve really dramatic greenhouse gas reduction goals.

Especially when you're thinking about the status quo state of the art of petrochemical refining, you're thinking about an entirely new approach of taking a renewable feedstock and converting that into the product that you're interested in. So, we have some pretty ambitious goals outlined here. The first one is to enable production of at least 10 renewable chemicals and materials with at least 70% greenhouse gas reduction. And that's compared to the petroleum incumbent.

So, here you're imagining there are 10 chemicals that we currently derive from petroleum or another nonrenewable resource. And we are going to provide the entire technology pathway to produce those chemicals in a renewable and sustainable way with this very significant greenhouse gas reduction. Related to that is the second goal, which is to produce a cost-effective and renewable bioplastic that can mitigate at least 50% of the greenhouse gas emissions. Again, as compared to how you would originally produce that plastic, which would be through a petrochemical feedstock. Next slide.

So, what does this mean? This slide kind of highlights the pieces of the process that BETO in particular can tackle. So, we're very involved in two of the Energy Earthshots™, the Clean Fuels and Products Shot™ as well as the Industrial Heat Shot™. So, with our kinds of technology for the Clean Fuels and Products Shot, we can really focus on, what are the feedstocks going into the overall process to get to the product that you're interested in?

So, we're looking at biobased monomers, improving recycled content of let's say plastic material. And let's say you're making a commodity chemical, you're looking at replacing all the feedstocks that you would normally require from the petrochemical industry and replacing those with renewable alternatives.

And then thinking about the Industrial Heat Shot, a biological process can be designed with new technologies that have lower heat requirements than traditional petrochemical refining process would. So, there are a couple of ways in terms of the feedstock, the conversion technology, and the overall process integration that can help improve the decarburization potential across the board.

So, I'd like to share a few examples of what kinds of projects we're specifically investing in to help achieve these very ambitious goals. So, working from left to right, the far left column is the agile biofoundry, and the Advanced Biofuels and bioproducts Process Development Unit, or the ABPDU, it's a little bit of a mouthful.

These two are partner projects where the agile biofoundry is really focused on building the underlying technologies for biological conversion of renewable feedstocks. And then the ABPDU is really focused on providing that pilot proof of concept. They work extensively with industry to provide those first materials that companies need to show that their product works.

So, we're looking at biomass-based feedstocks to produce biochemicals and biofuels. These are both run by the national labs, they have many industry and academic partners. Between the two of them, they've enabled at least 15 commercial products. So, you're thinking about products you're seeing on the shelves.

So, they're having a really big impact. And their current R&D work is working on both staff and chemicals. And the ABF's budget is $18 million for '24. ABPDU I should have put it on here separately is $3 million a year. The second column Diana mentioned the bottle consortium. It's co-funded between BETO and AMMTO.

And this is really in terms of industrial decarburization. We're thinking about, What can we tackle in terms of the feedstock and the process? So, thinking about biomass based feedstocks. Thinking about biological conversion, biological production, and green chemistry kinds of approaches to make these the materials that we need but in a more sustainable manner.

And the important thing that bottle does is any material that they make has the end of life designed at the outset. So, you're thinking of what is the end of life impact and how can we engineer the materials to work in a more sustainable way? And I know I'm a little bit short on time. So, we have the CO₂ consortium, that's focused on this relatively newer area of using these greenhouse gases themselves as a feedstock thinking again about the feedstocks.

And then finally, we have an entire consortium led by the national labs focused on bioprocessing separations. So, this is really focusing on you have a new bioprocess, you have to get the product that you're interested in out of a heterogeneous mixture, how do you do that in a low energy and efficient way?

So, I think that was my last slide. Next slide. With that, I'd like to thank you so much for your attention. And I'm happy to talk with anyone who's interested in these biological approaches and thinking about using these renewable resources to get us the chemicals and fuels that we need for the future. Thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: All right. Thank you very much, Gayle. And let me invite all of the speakers back up here for a short round of Q&A. I think I'm going to preemptively say that we will take three questions.

AUDIENCE: Thank you all for the wonderful presentations. Quick question for Gayle Bentley: Have you at all looked at … There's been some disagreement in my organization about how large a role you could scale up bioenergy to play without having negative impacts, whether it's on land-use change or causing importation of biomass from places that may have land-use change overseas or looking at the fertilizer and energy inputs and end to emissions and water energy to create and pump water. Have you looked at … Do you make estimates of how far can we push sustainable bioenergy before we start edging into these impacts?

GAYLE BENTLEY: Absolutely. You have a very timely question as just last week we released the billion-ton '23 report that does an extensive study of: What are the available biomass? And now we're looking at other kinds of waste resources that I mentioned and looking at what's available, what's the demand, and what are future projections.

So, I don't know, Zach, if we can link the chat in the chat to folks there in person. But I can add that to the chat. But yes, we've done those very thorough analysis with our national lab partners. And this report highlights a lot of those interesting scenarios. So, I encourage you to take a look.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I will. Thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: We can distribute that to folks. Tomas.

AUDIENCE: Yes, actually, I was reminded about this question. Oh, thank you. Just a reminder about this question [INAUDIBLE] and listening to what I'm going to call at least the explicitly decarburized fuels that be it hydrogen or bioenergy. And what I'm wondering is: Who's keeping the tally on the sourcing of these fuels? So, when we talk about bioenergy, you have to be careful that in the transport of it in a supplemental processing of it or so transport over there weren't greenhouse gas emissions. The color of hydrogen has a lot … Are we talking gray hydrogen? Are we talking green hydrogen? Even if we talk green hydrogen, some would have you say, “Well, look at the embedded emissions associated with how even that green hydrogen came about—wind turbines and what have you.” So, and it's not trivial to try to track that deeply, but how are we keeping account of that when we talk about industrial decarburization especially on those fuels scenarios?

TOMAS GREEN: I'll start with the hydrogen perspective. We've invested in the GREET model for decades now at 20 years. We've invested in this life cycle assessment model that Argonne National Lab develops. And we don't use the colors of hydrogen. We try to only talk about hydrogen in terms of its carbon intensity because we think that's the most important thing to focus on rather than a branding exercise, essentially.

And so what that does is it looks at the well to gate emissions. So, it doesn't necessarily look at embedded emissions within the equipment. And it doesn't necessarily look at what happens to hydrogen after it leaves the facility. But that is the most critical path because it captures the grid emissions that goes into especially electrolyzers that's incredibly important as well as the upstream gas emissions from hydrogen produced from natural gas.

So, we don't consider hydrogen clean unless it's four kilograms of CO₂ produced per kilogram of hydrogen. The industrial standard today is about 10 kilograms of CO₂ produced per kilogram of hydrogen. So, unless it's 60% better, we're not even considering it clean hydrogen. And then with investment tax credits, or sorry, the production tax credits, you can receive that has very strict guidance around the different levels.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Anything you want to add to that on the bioenergy perspective?

GAYLE BENTLEY: I would just echo that we also invest heavily in GREET and other life cycle assessment tools. And I do think that this is a really poignant question. And a lot of the LCAs are limited by looking at cradle to gate rather than cradle to grave. And in the bottle consortium, in particular, because they're looking at plastics, I think there's a lot of consideration there in terms of, what are the lasting environmental impacts?

Thinking about things like extended producer responsibility, thinking about: How do you model cradle to grave for biodegradable or compostable products? We have the ability to look at what is the entire life cycle because we know what happens to them. And so we're doing some of this longer modeling of what happens to these materials in the environment. And how can we include that in the overall profiles? It's definitely something we're considering as a big priority.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Thanks. And Eric.

AUDIENCE: Eric Massenet, for those online. I have another hydrogen question. You mentioned blending of hydrogen into existing natural gas infrastructure up to I don't know what is it, 15% or something maybe less. Do you have a sense of where that might make sense for industry? You mentioned certain temperature processes.

But in theory, it could go anywhere natural gas can go. But practically speaking, would it be certain types of locations, industry clusters? Would it be better just to electrify if you're going to invest in the central hydrogen infrastructure? So, I'm wondering if you teased out how we can use hydrogen as a stopgap for industrial heat through blending.

TOMAS GREEN: Yeah, and so, in our national strategy and roadmap, we identified high-temperature processes, so, was over 550 degrees Celsius that were … And so we leveraged the analysis that AMO did on the industrial decarburization roadmap where they broke out: How much energy do we use by heat category by range of heat values that we use?

And so we looked at the values over 550 degrees, which is predominantly some high—some chemical processes. But you're also looking at cement. You're also looking at iron and steel. You're looking at those sort of downstream casting functions. So, I think there's opportunities there when electrification is hard for those technologies.

Now, we're looking at thermal storage and it turns out that electrification might not be hard. And honestly, if it turns out that electrification isn't hard for those high temperature processes, then it's best to use that hydrogen for other strategic opportunities. We don't want to displace something that would be beneficially electrified with hydrogen for the sake of it being hydrogen. We want it to be strategic advantage for it to play.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: All right. Great. Let me thank our speakers again. Thank you very much. And we will go to another round of lightning talks next. After this round, rest assured you will have a break. But let's plow through these. So, the first lightning talk will be from Gail McLean from the Office of Science where she is director of the Chemical Sciences Geosciences and Biosciences Division. And I will pull her slides up

GAIL MCLEAN: I also want to thank everyone for the opportunity to tell you a little bit about what the Office of Science supports. Some of the fundamental research that we fund that could help advance our industrial decarburization. The Office of Science delivers scientific discoveries and major scientific tools that can help transform our understanding of nature as well as advance the energy economic and national security of the United States.

We do that through different mechanisms including funding more than 34,000 researchers at different universities and institutions and as well as the 17 DOE national labs. We also have 28 office of science scientific user facilities. And we steward 10 of the 17 DOE national labs. This slide just shows you the range of research program offices in the Office of Science. It's a broad range of physical sciences from computational research to basic energy sciences such as chemistry, geosciences where I am, biology, all the way to various aspects of physics.

The fundamental science that we support in Office of Science whether computational, chemistry, materials, biology, biochemistry, along with the research that is taking place at our Office of Science user facilities can help us address some of those challenges that are facing industrial decarburization.

In addition to the single investigator and small group research projects that we support in Office of Science, we have a number of center efforts that also are relevant for industrial decarburization efforts. These include Energy Frontier Research Centers, which is a program in Basic Energy Sciences, and the Bioenergy Research Centers out of biological and environmental research, energy Innovation hubs on solar fuels as well as energy storage, and most recently, the Energy Earthshot Research Centers, or EERCs. The EERCs are part of the Office of Science Energy Earthshots Initiative. This is a joint initiative among three offices in the Office of Science: Basic Energy Sciences, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and Biological and Environmental Research. And the goal is to address key basic science challenges that could help us advance the DOE Energy Earthshot stretch goals for the first six DOE Energy Earthshots. We have two programs in the Energy Earthshots initiative for Office of Science. The EERCs, which are multidisciplinary multi-institutional lab-led efforts again focused on fundamental research targeting a single Earthshot in general. The scientific foundations for Energy Earthshots program are small group awards led by academic or private sector institutions. And they focus on foundational scientific challenge that could span Earthshot. So, it's not limited to a single Earthshot.

In Fiscal &ear 2023, we announced 29 awards for the initiative, 11 EERCs, and 18 science foundation grants. And what I'm going to do is just quickly go through some of those awards that could provide foundational knowledge relevant to industrial decarburization. For the Energy Earthshots Research Centers, the center led out of Argonne National Laboratory focuses on steel electrification. It's looking at an electrodeposition process with the goal of being able to provide foundational knowledge that can help us better deposit usable iron metal at lower temperatures than current processes.

The process of project led out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory focuses on nonequilibrium energy transfer for efficient reactions. Here they're looking at replacing bulk steady state heating with electrified processes. And they're using mechanocatalysis and joule heating for these efforts. And finally, the Center for Coupled chemomechanics of cementitious composites for EGS focuses on enhanced geothermal systems. Oops. OK. This is led out of Brookhaven National Laboratory. But we see a connection there with industrial decarburization because it's attempting to figure out some of the fundamental science underlying chemical transformations and mechanical properties of composite materials.

In the Science Foundation Awards, these are university-led awards, the project out of Arizona State University, where we have a PI over here, focuses on fundamental studies of hydrogen arc plasmas for high efficiency and carbon-free steel making. From Georgia Institute of Technology, we have a project focusing on thermal energy storage materials and composites really trying to figure out how they can address the scientific knowledge gaps and improve storage capacity and minimize degradation of materials.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a project looking at, can we harness electrostatics for conversion of organics water and air in looking at the redox reactions that are happening in water droplets? So, what's the unique chemistry that's happening in these microdroplets? And can that be used to improve CO₂ capture as well as electrosynthesis?

And then two bio focused projects that I wanted to mention one out of Ohio State University looking at how we can take a biological route to synthesize the industrial platform chemical propylene. And the goal is to really integrate processes here to improve conversion. And finally, a project is focusing on using photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation for carbon neutral production of nitrogen-rich compounds. This is led out of Washington University in Saint Louis. And it's again looking to, how can we reduce energy and CO₂ emissions when we make chemicals and synthetic fertilizers?

And then just to close very quickly, the Energy Frontier Research Centers that are part of the BES program, I wanted to mention four of those. One is focusing on: How do we develop better catalysts? Where we can better control the catalytic reactions and accelerate those reactions? Are there ways that we can design catalysts to increase decarburization and optimize the catalytic reactions while they're happening? A fourth project focuses on closing the carbon cycle using dilute streams for conversion of carbon dioxide. And the final project I wanted to mention focuses on materials. Can we better understand how to predict and control the evolution of materials so that we can accelerate discovery of new materials that are more sustainable and use hydrogen and CO₂ more efficiently? And just a quick thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Thank you very much. So, up next will be Sarah Forbes from the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management where she's acting director for the Office of Carbon Management Technologies. There we go.

SARAH FORBES: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. And I'm going to try not to talk for too long and we'll be happy to take your questions. So, our Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has five R&D divisions: hydrogen with carbon management, carbon transport and storage, carbon dioxide removal and conversion. Actually, this is an old slide. I just caught that. That's embarrassing. So, one of the things we did last year was we split the CO₂ conversion and carbon dioxide removal into two separate programs. So, we have CO₂ conversion and utilization and CDR—Carbon Dioxide Removal, and then point-source carbon capture.

The way our office is also structured, which probably doesn't pertain to our discussion today but maybe is interesting, is we also have separate divisions that support strategic analysis and engagement including international engagement. When I first came back to DOE in 2015, a lot of our engagement work was internationally focused. Today, we're doing much more domestic engagement as carbon management projects move forward and communities are raising concerns where we're really leaning in and doing a lot of on the ground work in engagement domestically. So, our work on carbon management goes back a pretty long time.

We started with seed funding in 1997. This slide shows some of the key milestones from a carbon dioxide capture from a point-source carbon capture perspective. The Archer Daniel Midlands Plant started operating in 2010 injecting CO₂ from ethanol refining. Air products has a steam methane reformer at the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, that has been capturing CO₂ and using it for enhanced oil recovery since 2013. One of the interesting things about that project is the DOE funding for it and did a really long time ago. And I had the chance to travel there last year and meet with the project manager, and they're still operating the system because it works and because they can sell the CO₂. Petra Nova was also a DOE demonstration, which is complete from a Department of Energy perspective. It was mothballed for a while, but the new owner, JX Nippon, has brought it back and it's operating today. That CO₂ is also being used for enhanced oil recovery.

This map is … I know it's messy, but I want to start by showing there has a lot happening in carbon management across the United States. So, those triangles are some of our carbon safe projects. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about the carbon safe program. In the bipartisan infrastructure law, that's the carbon storage validation and testing program. We've also done work in some of the earlier phases. I like to think of that as the government seeding funding for advanced site characterization. You can't do carbon storage correctly if you don't understand the geology. So, this is the government funding. Now the little plants on this map, those are site-specific feed studies that we've done in cement, chemicals, in the power sector, as well as direct air capture, ethanol, and hydrogen.

And the lines that you see on the map, those are pipeline feed studies. So, this is government providing support for the work that you need to do to do the upfront design and engineering if you're really going to do these projects. This slide shows a little bit of our budget history. I mentioned the program started in 1997. And this graph we only go back to 2017 because that's when the program started to look like it currently does. I was able to update it for this fiscal year. We're at $428 million, and you can see here how it's split between capture, storage, conversion, CDR, and hydrogen with carbon management. I'll talk briefly about each of the programs. So, for point-source carbon capture, I want to actually give a couple of historical statistics because I have them and I think it's pretty cool.

Over the past 15 years, the R&D funding for point-source carbon capture that our program has managed it was about $1.3 billion. So, what did we get from that? 170 patents, 570 (at least) peer reviewed journal articles, 46 technologies validated at the technology readiness 6 level, five at technology readiness 7, 35 feed and prefeed studies, about 80 companies have done new licensing deals or performed partnerships, and this has resulted in some of the funding that we've seen and which you'll hear about from some of the other offices in terms of demonstration and deployment.

I should mention just a little bit. So, in terms of what we're doing in this area right now, our focus, we have a strong focus on industrial sources where, especially cement, there's a lot of opportunity, and I'm excited about the research we'll be kicking off in the next year in that area. We are also doing more work on both collecting data, doing research, and understanding the non-CO₂ air quality impacts associated with carbon capture.

And we also continue to do that basic R&D on solvent, sorbent, membranes, and novel concepts so that we get more technologies in the higher TRO levels. So, carbon dioxide removal … This program, this year as well as last year, I think, is at the $70-million-level, feeds into the department's goals of gigaton-scale carbon removal by 2050.

And our program areas are pretty expansive. We're looking at direct air capture, biomass carbon removal and storage, or BiCRS. I would say that BiCRS is also inclusive of bio of BECCS, or Bioenergy with CCS, which is what we see more in the IPCC scenarios. Marine or ocean CDR and enhancement mineralization, so, mineralizing, adding CO₂ to encourage and increase accelerate natural processes for mineralization.

This area is … So, every year in August, we do our program review meeting in Pittsburgh. And we're starting to consider it carbon management week. I will say that the energy around CDR is fantastic. There are companies that have … It is the time and place for CDR where students are going from Ph.D. students to CEOs and making things happen. And that's not just in DAC; it's in some of the other areas as well. It's pretty exciting.

Hydrogen with carbon management is down this year in the budget to about $80 million, $85 million. This is … So, we work closely of course with the Hydrogen Technology Office, which you just heard from. In this program, it includes a little bit of work on things like advanced turbines, advanced gasification, solid oxide fuel cells, sensors and controls, you know building on the work that we started in the fossil energy power plant context, simulations-based engineering using CO₂ as a working fluid and advanced materials.

So, at its core, it's all about hydrogen with carbon management. But it touches on some of the core materials research that we've been doing since the '90s or before. The CO₂ conversion program area is at $52.5 million this year. And we really focus on three areas. So, on algae and bioproducts, on fuel producing fuels and chemicals from CO₂, and on mineralization.

And in this program, the mineralization is geared towards building products. Some of the ways and the prizes that you heard about from other programs … We're doing prizes and direct air capture. And in CO₂ conversion, we're working with other parts of the department in trying to find vendors and determine how we use government procurement for CDR, and also for CO₂ conversion to create that pipeline and need for materials. Sorry, wrong way.

Transport … You can't store CO₂ underground without a transport system. So, we're funding front-end engineering design studies. And those are multimodal. So, we've funded some pipeline studies both tied with some of our carbon storage project projects. But we're also thinking about: What about systems where that doesn't work? How do you map multi modes of transportation together to make systems work?

We work closely with the loan program office in the CIFIA program. So, there's federal funding for projects that build pipelines beyond the capacity that's needed for the project. So, extra capacity you can apply to DOE for a loan program.

You can also get a future growth grant which our office manages. And that future growth grant doesn't have to be for a pipeline, but it does have to be a common carrier. And that can fund up to 80% of the cost of the CO₂ transport system. The funding opportunity announcement for that should be out very soon. The carbon storage program dates back to 2003 when we started our regional carbon sequestration partnership initiative. At that time, the regional carbon sequestration partnership initiative was not just geologic storage. It also looked at terrestrial and ocean issues. Over time, it became much, much more focused on geologic storage because that was seen as a strong priority.

So, over 20 successful field tests validating carbon storage through that time frame led to creation of the carbon safe program in 2016, I like to just … The easiest way to understand this program is we're providing the funding and the support for turnkey commercial scale geologic storage facilities in the United States.

In terms of the phases, we don't expect projects to match through from a prefeasibility Phase 1 all the way through a commercial Phase 4 construction. In fact, EPA has had permits for geologic storage projects that have come out of Phase 2 projects that were a Phase 2 carbon-safe project. We funded some feasibility. They went ahead and applied successfully for an EPA Class 6 permit. If a project does go all the way to Phase 3, 3.5, or 4, they are doing all of the work that they need to have that application to EPA ready and have also completed NEPA and community benefits plans.

I'm going to end with this slide. It shows the impact both of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, but also the impact of our carbon safe program in terms of the numbers of projects. So, in 2008, there was one EPA Class 6 permit for geologic storage that had been submitted.

We're projecting in 2024 about 102. And the CarbonSAFE projects that haven't yet applied for a permit are shown in green. The CarbonSAFE projects that have applied for an EPA permit already are shown in blue. And industry-led permits that don't have any involvement from our program are shown in gray. So, it's a busy time in the carbon management space. And happy to take questions when the time comes for that. Thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Thank you very much, Sarah. We will hear next from the Office of Nuclear Energy. And in particular, Jason Marcinkoski who's a program manager in the Office of Nuclear Energy. So—

JASON MARCINKOSKI: Afternoon. Can you hear me?

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: —Jason, and we are getting your slides pulled up.

JASON MARCINKOSKI: Can you hear me OK?

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Yes, we can. Thank you.

JASON MARCINKOSKI: Great. I had some technical difficulties just prior. So, OK. So, I'm the program manager for Nuclear Integrated Energy Systems as well as the Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program’s Flexible Plant Operation and Generation Pathway. And I wanted to … OK, great. I guess we’re scrolling through the PDF.

So, there's a lot of exciting work going on in nuclear energy and advanced nuclear reactors have a lot of great potential making them very capable as energy sources. Some of these features are liquid coolants, such as molten salt and liquid metal. They're really advantageous because they don't rely on pressure and they can remain a liquid at high temperature. High-temperature gas reactors are operating upward towards 750°C, enabling broad use in industrial and chemical applications.

And fast reactors can be technically capable of producing its own fissile fuel providing for a vastly more efficient use of fuel resources. And additionally, those types of reactors can burn actinides, which are otherwise the long-lived components of high-level nuclear waste. Advanced reactors are designed to be walkaway safe using physics-based passive cooling and reactivity control mechanisms. They have smaller emergency planning zones allowing close proximity to industrial applications. And they have high power density resulting in low land use and low embodied emissions among the lowest embodied emissions of all the generation resources.

They have high availability and reliability, which provides for a high capacity factor which is definitely good for economics. And we're expecting about 200 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity according to the DOE lift-off report. And it sounds challenging but if we start with two gigawatts a year in 2029 and ramp up to 13 gigawatts by 2035 through 2050, we can achieve 200 gigawatts. And we've been able to demonstrate in the past in the '70s and '80s about 5 gigawatts per year on average, peaking around 10 gigawatts. So, it's well within reason.

So, let me see if I can get … Can you advance the slide for me? OK. Thank you. So, I should have used a different format. Today, over 90 reactors are in operation of mitigated 16 billion metric tons of CO₂ over their recent 25 years of operation. While the current landscape is large reactors with providing reliable firm power to the grid, the future landscape is quite different.

Advanced nuclear plants will not only produce electricity but will be able to decarburize the transportation and industrial sectors of the economy with thermal, electrical, and chemical energy while continuing to support the needs of the grid with greater flexibility. And some of this flexibility comes from reactors that can flex. But we're also working on thermal energy storage technologies to keep reactors operating at their optimal levels, which is full power. Can you advance, please?

So, this graphic shows the major potential energy pathways for nuclear energy. As you can see, at the top of the chart hydrogen is the first chemical feedstock needed to use nuclear energy and most of the large industrial processes. On the right, this includes refineries, ammonia, steel, polymers, and chemicals.

We produce syngas, methanol, and all of the transportation fuels at the bottom with hydrogen. And nuclear E-fuels also consume CO₂ making them net-zero emissions. And the fuels are used in significant quantities in industry. So, we've started to focus on hydrogen and we plan to work our way down this chart to develop these key chemical energy pathways. Also, the chart helps identify where nuclear heat can be used for industrial processes. You can advance.

So, this chart shows the temperature requirements for various industries. On the right, Joe showed this earlier. And reactor capabilities on the left. I just wanted to highlight that HTGRs, high-temperature gas reactors, are close very close to commercialization, while very-high-temperature reactors are more of a goal. So, the bottom line is we're very confident in supplying thermal loads directly up to about 700°C, which nearly covers all the major thermal demands shown on the right, the majority of them. Next slide, please.

This slide shows the overall decarburization potential of the United States through a nuclear lens. This is an upper bound based on 2022 consumption data and the 2018 data from the manufacturing energy consumption survey. We quantify the potential in terms of average electric gigawatts. So, starting on the right side, we identified four target industries to provide on-site combined heat and power with nuclear reactors.

These include refineries, chemical, plants, forest products, and iron and steel. And it turns out that these … As we look through this data, it turns out that these are the only industries that generate their own electricity. So, it's kind of validating when we notice that. So, we focus on these because they're industries that are large enough to break through the market in nuclear.

We've made some notional assumptions that still need sharpening and this is a work in progress. For example, we assume 20% of industrial fuel heat can be electrified and served with nuclear power; 10% of industrial fuel heat can be served directly with nuclear. And then we assume all steam and electricity loads for this four target industries can be met by local nuclear generation.

The remainder of the industrial fuel demand covering all industrial use is shown on the left. Note that this fuel amount does not include steam or electricity generation. So, this is just fuel for process heat primarily. The power level shown is the power to produce e-fuels that would be used to substitute for traditional fuels. Because they're fungible, this quantity is not limited to just the four large target industries that produce their own energy. It can be used across the board.

So, this is a bounding exercise not meant to show that nuclear energy is the only solution, but it's here to help guide our research efforts on areas of great impact. And we can easily see the scale of the problem is huge. There's a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity in both the fuels space on site combined heat and power space and electricity just our bread and butter electricity generation.

So, again, the lift-off report shows 200 gigawatts of additional nuclear capacity by 2050. But this data indicates the potential is perhaps a lot higher and could offer opportunities beyond 2050 for nuclear and other technologies, other clean generation technologies or carbon sequestration. Next slide, please.

So, this is our organization. We stood up these pillars about a year ago. And we're fairly new program really. The national impact area estimates the U.S. market potential the environmental impact of systems that integrate nuclear reactors and their thermal energy into industrial processes that produce fuels, chemicals, materials, and electricity.

The industrial applications area develops industrial requirements reference processes and plant designs to support techno-economic assessments, site integration, and the safety basis for implementing nuclear applications. The thermal systems area evaluates and develops thermal energy transport systems for a variety of temperatures distances and industrial uses. This includes heat extraction, thermal storage, temperature boosting, and control systems. And our chemical systems area develops chemical conversion pathways and test processes for synthesis of fuels, chemicals, and materials from nuclear energy. Next slide, please.

So, we have some work on the ground. Some of these are in collaboration with the hydrogen office. They're demonstration projects for producing hydrogen with nuclear to help drive down the costs and be in a position to deploy at scale. DOE is currently supporting three projects, including a 1-megawatt low-temperature electrolysis system at Nine-Mile Point.

This system has been running since February 2023. And it's the nation's first nuclear powered clean hydrogen production facility. Next, we have the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station working on a 1- to 2-megawatt electrolysis system. And finally, the Prairie Island 150-kilowatt high-temperature electrolysis unit will be a first of its kind to use nuclear heat for hydrogen production. So, these first movers represent an important step in advancing the technical feasibility and scale up of clean hydrogen production utilizing clean nuclear energy.

So, we have a couple other projects that I didn't have slides for today. One on co-electrolysis and also a feed study from Westinghouse looking at scale up of electrolyzer installations at nuclear plants. And I'll leave it at that for today. Just a quick version of what we're up to in the nuclear office. Thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: All right. Thanks, Jason. And our last speaker in this block will be Chris Vandervort who is a technology to market advisor at ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy. And I actually think that I have my PDF you are working on screen. So, I can share my screen for Chris.

CHRIS VANDERVORT: Sure. That would be great. First of all, how's the audio?

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: You're good.

CHRIS VANDERVORT: Excellent. So, I want to start off by saying thank you for this opportunity to talk about ARPA-E, our history, our mission, some of our current activities. A special thanks to both Sarah and Jason because you provided very helpful foundation for a couple of topics that I have. Let's go to the next chart.

ARPA-E was first envisioned in 2007. And that was in response to the economic crisis that we were facing at that time. The organization was formed. We signed our first contracts in 2009. And by 2023, we had made over 1,500 awards on over 74 programs. Our current funding on an annual basis is a little under $0.5 billion and exactly $470 million. Let's go to the next chart.

We have five missionaries. Three are original. Number one, reduce imports and strengthened U.S. manufacturing. Number two, reduce emissions. Initially, this was heavily focused on the traditional air and water emissions. And now obviously, we've expanded to have a heavy focus on decarburization and reduction of greenhouse gases including methane. And then improve efficiency. This was a very heavy focus in terms of power generation, turbines as an example, solar energy, as another example, and a couple of years ago we received two new missionaries. One is to improve radioactive waste management. And here we work very closely with the Office of Nuclear Energy. But I do want to give an example of a project that we're—sorry—a program that we're initiating. And that's transmutation of radioisotopes. And that's specifically trying to address the concern of radioactive long lived isotopes. And essentially, use transmutation through bombardment by very-high-energy ionizing radiation—for example, high-energy protons or hydrogen neutrons—and then transmute into a new isotope that has a shorter half-life and lower activity. And then the fifth area is to improve the energy infrastructure. And that's heavily focused on grid. And a recent example of a program that we have for grid is GOPHURRS. And this program is developing technologies that will improve the quality, the efficiency, lower the cost of underground power distribution. And the reason we do that is we have significant amounts of data from all around the world that underground distribution is significantly more reliable and more resilient than overhead distribution. Let's go to the next chart.

So, ARPA-E has a very special role within DOE. We intentionally don't have roadmaps. Our goal is to be nimble. Our goal is to be revolutionary. And we have certain elements of our culture that support that. For example, all of our fellows, tech markets, and program directors, are term limited. We start off with roughly a 3 year target, and one of the benefits is that lets us continually bring in fresh ideas.

Another benefit—and I'm already feeling it; I've been with ARPA-E for a little over 2 years—is that those 3 years go by very quickly. And we all have a great deal that we'd like to accomplish. So, it helps to provide a special sense of urgency. ARPA-E's mandate is to explore high-risk but high-reward early-stage technologies. You've seen the charts earlier today of our typical projects will start about TRL 2, maybe TRL 3.

The majority of our projects are funded through programs. And I gave those two examples, transportation and GOPHURRS. A typical program is about $45 million and lasts through 4 years. That $45 million will typically cover about 15 project teams. And we work through a Phase 1 and a Phase 2. So, typically, Phase 1 is about 2 years. A typical Phase 1 award might be $2 million. A subset of the program teams are chosen for Phase 2. So, typically, for Phase 2, we'll have maybe five to seven project teams. And their budgets will be roughly $5 million over that remaining 2 years.

We follow the government contracting protocol in that we release FOAs. And with FOAs, typically we have a stage where we see concept papers, we'll do reviews of the concept papers, we provide a recommendation to follow up or not, and then we go through a competitive process.

Our projects are very actively managed. Our program directors are given the authority. Typically, if we have a project that's doing great, we have the ability to plus them up, help them move faster and cover more scope. And we also have the authority to either reduce the budget or even completely cancel a project if it's not meeting its deliverables. We have a special program at ARPA-E, and it's called SCALEUP. And that lets us fund essentially TRL-4 to -5 activities. And SCALEUP is limited to project teams that have IP from a previous ARPA-E project. Next chart, please.

And this chart represents that—the time frame. So, I talked about the research phase, and that's Phase 1 and Phase 2. SCALEUP can provide funding to move to a prototype stage. But more importantly, as we go through the research phase, all of our projects have [INAUDIBLE] advisors, like myself, who work very closely with the program directors. We require that a minimum of 5% of the funding be spent on tech to market activities. And this includes things like industrial outreach, developing manufacturing partners, developing techno-economic analysis, even at a very early stage. In addition, we have excellent ties with the venture capital community. So, even in that research phase, we'll be providing introductions and helping develop pitch books for outreach to venture capital. So, as we enter the prototype phase, not only do we have our own scale up as a means of continued funding, but we also have these ties with venture capital that help cross over that first valley of death. And in fact, we'll talk about that as a mountain of opportunity. So, we have both our own program, SCALEUP. We also have connections to the investor community that can help a technology move forward to commercialization. For demonstration, this is where we rely very heavily on our partners within the Department of Energy. And there are … A number are here in this session. And we'll have conversations with them if we think a technology has significant potential. We'll set up discussions, we'll do everything we can to support a hand off so that these other elements of the Department of Energy can follow their protocols to move these technologies forward. Let's go to the next chart, please.

We track our metrics. And I'm just going to touch on a few. So, we've provided $3.68 billion of R&D funding to over 1,500 projects. And we carefully track the amount of additional funding that we receive. And as of today, that's almost $12 billion. And if you just do some simple math, take that $12 billion round up to $4 billion, you've got roughly a factor of $3 billion.

And that's a number that we're heavily focused on. We want that number to be as high as possible. We want our early stage say TRL-2 to -5 projects we want to see them receive follow on funding and then ideally be commercialized as possibly new companies, new arms of existing businesses, or really whatever the right mechanism is. Another number I'd like to point out is 150 companies that have been formed by ARPA-E projects. And then I'd like to drop below and mention that we have over 1,000 patents and over 300 licenses. Let's go to the next chart.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: And Chris, I will go to the next chart, but let's try to wrap up soon so we can do a brief Q&A and give folks a short break.

CHRIS VANDERVORT: Sure. Yes. This chart—and I'm sure that these charts will be made available—just shows the range of technologies that we fund. Let's go to the next page. Two programs I want to highlight first of all, FLECCS. FLECCS is natural gas combined cycles with carbon capture and storage. It started off as a highly technical to economic focus program where we were trying to understand looking towards the future the profitability and dispatchability of combined cycles with carbon capture. Go to the next page.

These are the five Phase 2 technology teams. And then we also have a modeling effort by Professor Jesse Jenkins and his Princeton Zero Lab.

Go ahead to the next chart.

And as we've worked through this program, one of our key learnings has been that we need to make sure our carbon capture teams fully understand how today's combined cycles are being operated and dispatched. And this is where I had some former experience with my former company working on advanced gas turbine and combined cycles. And since about 2000, we had been seeing significant changes in how they were operating. We had the luxury of baseload in the late '90s and early 2000s. But as we saw increasing renewables, these combined cycles were asked to enter intermittent duty.

And just a quick number as to where they are today, a modern combined cycles can ramp at 20% load per minute. And a single train gas steam and turbine steam turbine generator can produce over 600 megawatts, can turn down below 200. And what that means is you can place 400 megawatts on the grid in less than 5 minutes. And that's great, but the carbon capture system has to keep up with it. So, a heavy focus that we have recently been working on, and we've been working closely with FECM, has been to make sure that our teams do, in carbon capture systems, appreciate the dynamics that their systems need to be capable of. Go ahead to the next chart, please.

So, our recommendation has just been that we continue to look at the integration of system-level challenges. And that's … We have to think not so much of these three elements, the plant, the carbon capture, and the long-term distribution disposition. But we have to think about how they integrate. Typically combine cycles in a region see similar operating profiles over the day. And that's because weather systems tend to be regional.

And what that means is that, if a plant is running and capturing carbon, the downstream system has to be able to accept the same type of transients that the plant needs to go through. So, we've been calling for a truly integrated approach and a large-scale dynamic analysis of the entire system.

Go ahead. Next page.

We have multiple programs in industrial heat. I'm just going to mention the names: HITEMMP, which is heavy focus on heat exchangers; our ROSIE, which is high-risk, high-reward for iron and steel. And then we're talking to the Office of Nuclear Energy of we have an idea that there might be an ARPA-E role in nuclear heat. We're not there yet, we're still in the very preliminary stages. But it's something that is in discussion.

Go ahead to the next chart.

And here, I just want to highlight our website. This is ROSIE, ore-to-steel and sustainability and decarburization. Our website provides all of our project teams’ additional detail. Our email addresses are listed both for program directors and tech to market. And my request would be if you have interest, please reach out to any of us.

Let's go to the next chart.

And I just want to highlight: Our Energy Innovation Summit is scheduled for May 22–24 in Dallas, Texas. And there'll be over 3,000 attendees. We've just released our list of keynote speakers. And there'll be more to come. And I encourage you to attend. And I'll just close with a thank you for this opportunity.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: All right. Thank you very much, Chris. So, I think, let's take like one question, and then have 10 minutes to stretch our legs, mentally collect ourselves before we wrap up with the last 20 minutes or so of presentations. If there are no questions, then I will thank again our speakers, Gayle, Sarah, Jason, and Chris. Thanks so much for these presentations. And let's pause for 10 minutes. Everybody, please stretch your legs, go get some water, use the restroom, and we will have a final 20 minutes or so of presentations before we wrap up for today.

AUDIENCE: For the onslaught there. I realize not too long it's that one—

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Wrap things up with a coup— Oh, there's the recording. Welcome back. Let's wrap things up with a couple more lightning talks. We're just going to hear two more lightning talks today. The first, well, so both of them are focused on the demonstration and deployment work at DOE. The first will be from Kelly Visconti who you met earlier today. She's the acting deputy director for manufacturing and workforce development within MESC. So, Kelly, I'll hand it over to you.

KELLY VISCONTI: Thanks, Zach. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I know this is end of the day. We'll try and keep this short. There's way more information in here than I'm going to talk to. But I wanted you to have the information and always available and happy to answer any questions. So, fundamentally, manufacturing energy supply chain office was stood up two years ago as part of the restructuring to support the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.

Our mission is really focused on how of the energy transition, and I think of our mission as threefold: one, build out manufacturing capacity here in the United States for key supply chain gaps; two, make that manufacturing as efficient and low carbon as possible; and three, make sure we have the workforce that we need to operate the new facilities that we're building out.

You can see from this chart sort of where MESC sits in the overall arc of the research development demonstration deployment pipeline and the types of funding that we provide. We are literally building factories, retrofitting factories, putting concrete, and steel hopefully low carbon in the ground to make all of the things that we need including those materials.

I mentioned our three sort of core pieces, investing in manufacturing capacity, investing in the workforce, and there's a really important analytical backbone so that we're making sure our investments are going to those really key critical supply chain gaps. We do not have enough funding to fund everything that we would want to make. We have to be really strategic and put those I think earlier eggs in the right baskets. So, a lot of work around analysis that we're building out as well.

I'm just going to focus on a few programs that are under my purview. There's three main pillars within our office: one focused around EV and critical materials and the battery supply chains, one focused around analysis and other core investments, and then the team that I work on is primarily focused around small- and medium-sized manufacturers. And a series of programs really aimed at helping build that capacity.

I think the statistics are something like 99% or some very large number in the '90s are small and medium sized manufacturers, and 70% of them are less than 20 people organizations. So, this is really the key backbone of manufacturing in the United States and a really important piece of making sure we have the supply chains we need. And then to Joe's point earlier, addressing that tail of the emissions really critical.

So, just want to highlight a few programs. Our Advanced Energy Manufacturing Recycling Grant Program … This is $750 million total. We issued a first round of this last year and selected seven projects. These are focused for small medium sized manufacturers. They have to be located in coal transition communities. So, to my point earlier, this is where our coal fired power plant or coal mine has been shut down within a certain period of time.

And it really has an economic development element to it. Primary focus is manufacturing. Key critical supply chain components and materials but also creating jobs and really helping build out economic development. You can see in this slide the first seven projects. It's a wide range of portfolio. Unlike our technology offices sister offices, we do not have a specific focus. It's not the wind manufacturing office, it is the manufacturing office. So, from our first round, you can see we have a project around high-temperature ultrapure chromium metal. And we have programs—excuse me—projects around energy conservation. We're talking about triple- and quadruple-pane glass units. We have a program around amorphous materials for grid transformers and motors.

So, a range of projects that came out of our first round selections … We have a second round that is now out on the street. This is for $425 million. This is the remaining balance of the funds. And consent papers are currently due early April—the 8th—and full applications in June. The other really fun part that ties in particular to the group and the conversation we're having here is the inclusion of the industrial decarburization work.

So, in the statute, there were two parts of the provision, one was make clean energy stuff and the second was reduce emissions in existing facilities. So, we've been able to craft a portfolio, or we hope to craft a portfolio that will be literally reducing emissions in existing facilities. And also includes building or retrofitting factories to produce low carbon materials in addition to all of the other clean energy type of components for solar, or wind, or grid, or batteries that we want to see.

So, that was one program. We also have a program—the State Manufacturing Leadership program. We selected … This is money to go to states to help small-, medium-sized manufacturers access smart manufacturing capabilities or high-performance computing. We selected 12 states in the first round, and there will be a second round coming.

I'm going to shift gears just a little bit. So, the industrial assessment centers program, this is a highly successful program that's been going on for many decades. And several of you in the room are been super instrumental in making that program happen. Typically, the industrial assessment centers if you're not familiar operate in four year universities, higher institutions of higher education, and they're really training the next generation of energy engineers, undergraduate graduate students to do technical assistance and no cost assessments to small and medium sized manufacturers.

So, basically, any manufacturer located within the area that meets the rough eligibility criteria can get a free assessment. They get a report at that says here's how you can improve your energy, here's how you can reduce your costs, here's how you can lower your emissions, and basically be more economic and profitable in your operations.

Some great outcomes from the actual program and the training. Graduates from the IACs are 2.5 times more likely to work in the energy field than their academic peers, so mechanical engineers or other types of engineers ending up in the field of energy management. With the passing of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the IAC program expanded in several ways. One is the type of organizations that were funding to establish an IAC.

This now includes community colleges, union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools, nontraditional kind of partners in the program. And it's also expanded in the types of assessments and the type of training that we're offering through these programs. So, not just to engineers, but folks who are maybe interested in working line worker jobs, assembly jobs, welders, more technician-oriented career paths, which are essential for the manufacturing expansion.

We had a first round of this last year, selected 17 institutions and are in negotiations with them. We just launched a $24 million opportunity for additional IACs applications to May 16. The other related IAC program expanded was now the ability to help fund the implementation of those recommendations. So, once you have had an eligible assessment at no cost through the IAC program or through a series of partners we've identified as equivalent to the IACs, you can now apply for an up to $300,000 cost-match grant 50/50 to then implement those recommendations into your facility.

So, this is if you do have $400 million total for this. If you do $400 million by 300,000, that's thousands of factories that we can impact. We're building the program out to include more decarburization opportunities, resiliency, cybersecurity, we really want this to be a robust portfolio to really help companies be successful.

We just want to also point out we're using the partnership intermediary agreement. It's other transactions authority to operate this program. It gives us a lot of flexibility. It's a short five-page application. You submit that, show you're eligible, provide your actual assessment, we do a really quick turnaround. It's an ongoing rolling basis. Every quarter we close it to just look at applications so we can move quickly and get this money out there actually implemented in companies to be making a difference.

Two other programs I just want to touch on, and I know this is like lightning fast. There's backup slides with more details and I'm always happy to take questions offline. But the 48C investment tax credit—this is being executed through the IRS, but MESC is providing the technical backbone and support to the implementation of the tax credit.

So, the first round … I'm sure folks are very familiar with this. But the first round, if you're not … $4 million went out last year, and we are—the IRS will be making their determinations to the applicants by the end of March. And the second round is coming in the next couple of months. So, there's $6 billion left.

Similar to the 4029 program, it has multiple elements. One is the clean energy manufacturing or recycling. And I apologize I did not say recycling in the 4029 program, and it is—includes recycling production or recycling of advanced energy property, the second thread around critical materials processing refining and recycling, and then a third, very critically, industrial greenhouse gas emissions reductions. So, these are again projects to reduce emissions in existing facilities by at least 20% per the statute.

One other project of note, just to continue to get the word out on this: We have a rebate program for what they call extended product systems. Fundamentally, this is variable speed motors and control systems. You can see all the details there. But if any company has put these into place, they can apply for a rebate up to $25,000 per calendar year. So, small amounts of money but continuing to try to motivate and incentivize companies to be more efficient to take the steps to advance their operations. And with that, I will stop. All right, Andrew.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Yeah. Thank you very much, Kelly. So, up next we have Andrew Dawson. Andrew is the strategy and program development director in the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. And there we go.

ANDREW DAWSON: Thanks so much. Hi, everyone. Appreciate the time to speak with you today. I think I'm the last one. So, I'll try to move quickly and welcome any questions either here or offline. Certainly happy to go into more detail. So, I'm going to pretty much just do a quick overview of what I've said is as one of the newer offices you may not be as familiar, do a touch on the programs that we have that are relevant to the industrial space, and then go into a little bit deeper dive on the one that's sort of most closely or fully aligned with this particular topic area. So, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is the mission space is to deliver clean energy technology demonstration projects at scale in partnership with the private sector to accelerate deployment adoption and equitable transition to a decarburized energy system. So, all those words were chosen pretty deliberately. It goes at what we're really focused on which is that we are a technology-agnostic office that's focused on the challenges in front of the energy transition. And the major area that we're focused on is looking at commercial demonstrations—commercial-scale demonstrations.

So, I've highlighted the major programs that we currently have. These are pretty much all funded through either the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the Inflation Reduction Act. The one exception is the distributed energy systems program that we have through annual appropriations following those statutes.

So, the role that we fill is in the large-scale demonstrations. Really, there are things at this stage where we're looking at first-few-of-a-kind-type demonstrations but at a scale that is commercially relevant, capable of long-term sustained operations. And really, you're looking at proving out of not just the technical but the commercial and operational characteristics of a system such that you can significantly reduce investor risk for follow on projects.

And that goes to the fact that really, with our mission, it's not just the projects themselves; it's our really overarching goal is to trigger this wave of private sector financial kind of [inaudible] such that we can galvanize large-scale movement and transition in the energy sector. And so this is not just industrial, but it's anything from our clean hydrogen programs, our energy storage programs, our clean energy on mine lands programs, or energy in rural or remote communities programs.

The goals are to really show that certain solutions and models work, such that additional capital can flow in and accelerate this transition. The major programs that we're talking about for industrial or that have portions that are industrial, and this is where we'll get into sort of the tech-agnostic or sort of broader space.

The industrial demonstrations program is most closely aligned. I'll talk about that in a little more detail following this. Clean hydrogen I want to highlight because there are industrial applications within that program. That program has two major components, the hubs themselves and then the demand side support initiative. Both are under negotiations now. Selections were announced. You can certainly read more about that on our website.

Advanced nuclear … This is the advanced reactor demonstration program. And so, we are looking at production essentially heat for industrial steam in one of those projects. And then our point-source carbon capture portfolio, which is composed of both the carbon capture demonstrations and the large-scale pilots. Those are some of the projects that have been awarded a number of others are in negotiations. And this is a range of things. So, point-source carbon capture, for us, is also looking at the power generation sector, so, coal and natural gas then also industrial. I believe we have pulp and paper refining and cement in that portfolio, looking at those areas. And the other ones are more tangentially related, I would say, but still relevant for awareness. Long-duration energy storage … We do have a couple thermal solutions there. Distributed energy systems … We're looking at operational flexibility to reduce grid impacts. So, this may … I mean, this is an active program right now. But some of the ideas could be more flexible, electrification solutions, integration with storage, and similar for industrial systems.

And then our lift-off-enabling programs. This is a range of programs we work closely with the national labs and through the partnership intermediary agreement to produce to supply vouchers, do convening activities, and similar to share lessons learned and ensure that the information is flowing as best as possible to accelerate overall progress towards the energy transition.

So, going into a little more detail on our industrial demonstrations program … So, this is funded from both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. It's about a $6 billion total program of federal funds. We're really looking at transformative technologies that can decarburize energy intensive industries.

So, we had anything from near-net-zero Greenfield new facility builds down to a system and single production line type upgrades and retrofits. We set some targets around this asking people to target over 75% plus carbon intensity reductions at their facility or production line level.

And this is another program that hasn't had selections announced yet. The target date was, I think we said, is early 2024. So, this was really all of the above type program. We were looking at high-energy-, high-carbon-intensity processes and industries. We were open to any sort of solution space.

So, we were looking at electrification, energy efficiency, carbon capture, low carbon fuels and feedstocks, hydrogen alternative materials, etc. And we also have a mix of things. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at or been briefed on the lift-off report family that's out there. There's a few out there around the industrial space that helped to highlight and characterize some of the opportunities that are perceived by industry, DOE, and sort of establish a common fact base around some of the potential paths in near-term opportunities there.

And for this program, we were targeting kind of four major priorities: deep decarburization, which I mentioned; timeliness—with the Inflation Reduction Act, there is a sunset date for obligating the funds, and so we are looking to move quickly. Beyond just that statutory requirement, the goal with this program is to very rapidly galvanize additional actions. We're asking people to move fast. Market viability … Again, this gets to replicability. We want people to show that they have solutions and approaches that really are replicable, extensible, scalable. Such that these aren't one offs. These have a round of follow on investments and projects relatively quickly. And then community benefits. This is central to all of those said programs.

And I think much more broadly [INAUDIBLE] said, really we are trying to make sure that we are looking at a number of ways to ensure that the benefits of these projects and these efforts flow to the broader community both in terms of jobs, emissions, and environment, the labor, all of the above. So, I encourage, you … Our website has a lot of additional information on our approach to community benefits and the types of planning that we ask people to do around that. And with that, I think I'm done.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Thank you, Andrew. And let's back up here as well. Kathy got her name card up as soon as Andrew finished. So, we will go to her first.

AUDIENCE: Thanks. Being in industry, I hear a lot of commitments to meet their 2030 goals, 2030, '35 goals, and then 2015 net zero. And part of the challenge that they're having is they have many of the industries have an existing asset base, a large fleet of an existing asset base that still has useful life.

So, if they can't address that, then there's a bow wave of, let's say, their baseline is whatever their CO₂ numbers are in 2019. I'm making that up. And so they have committed to a reduction. If they can't address their current fleets, it's not necessarily a facility issue; it's a current fleets. Then it's a bow wave going out to 2050. So, my question is: Do either of your offices or programs address that? And I wasn't—I couldn't tell if it was a good fit in either of those areas of your teams.

KELLY VISCONTI: Can you just clarify what you mean by fleet? Like transportation fleet or—?

AUDIENCE: It could be transportation. It could be transportation fleet of trucks, could be fleet of locomotive rail. It could be fleet of existing power gen that institute fleet of assets.

ANDREW DAWSON: I mean, I think, from the OCED perspective, if you look at our industrial program, it is focused or a large area of emphasis was on retrofits, so, potentially full-facility retrofits, but acknowledging that there is an established industrial base, not just saying, “Well, we're just going to start building new stuff,” but also: How do you make the existing assets that have been providing value to the industry and the communities last longer, be able to transition be able to be part of that story?

And so, there is a lot of effort going on in terms of our industrial programs looking at working within existing facility envelopes or at least that existing facility sites. And I'll say beyond that the point source carbon capture and some of our other solutions are meant to be solution spaces that allow us to decarburize existing assets. So, you're not talking about building entirely—like you're not only building renewables; you're also looking at carbon capture for natural gas or coal thermal fleets.

KELLY VISCONTI: So, I think the indirect way we support that is through—I didn't highlight them here, but we have many transportation-related funding opportunities to build out the EV supply chain electrification, which includes hybrids, which includes a range of options. So, we're not directly funding companies to pay for the trucks and the transition. That's not in our portfolio. But we are helping the supply chain so they are more available and at cost that companies can make that transition. I think it's transportation-related emissions in that way is certainly I think not something being addressed in any particular program that I can think of within the Department of Energy. Thank you.

ANDREW DAWSON: One thing I might point you to is there's a joint program that's a DOE/DOT program that is looking a lot of transportation issues.

KELLY VISCONTI: Thank you for clarification.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: OK, there's perhaps time for one more question. Is Eric putting his tent away or is he—?

AUDIENCE: I was waiting for [INAUDIBLE]. I just have a in-the-weeds question for Kelly. So, the investments that are being made—the matching funds and the IAC, the IAC program. I mean, that's outstanding. Are you tracking which technologies are selected for matching? I'm wondering if you know that an IAC audit will reveal a dozen opportunities. But I'm wondering if there's any patterns in the types of technologies that companies choose to pursue thanks to the matching is the hardest stuff. Or is it because there's less friction? I'm wondering if you have any analytics around that could help us better understand barriers around certain technologies.

KELLY VISCONTI: So, Eric, we are about 9 months into the program, and we have about, I want to say, 80 projects, 70, 80 projects that we've selected. So, we've just begun building the database. We have some sense of the types of things that folks are interested in getting going. So, we haven't done the analytics yet. So, it's in the plan. We will definitely be doing that, but we don't have enough, I think, of a data sample of the 20,000-plus IAC reports that have been generated. Like, the 80 that we've got in this first tranche are people who we have more outreach to do on this program to get that through. And we would love to make it more competitive so that we're really pushing on the most effective and impactful solutions. But they range. They're everything from very small efficiency programs to rooftop solar HVAC, variable speed drives. You can see the list, and we have … Again we haven't done the analytics yet. But you can see the information on the ones we've selected so far. You're the second person in, like, the last week to ask me that. So, like, it's—

AUDIENCE: It's always good.

KELLY VISCONTI: No, it's—Yep. yep, yep. OK.

AUDIENCE: Thanks.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: All right. Thank you very much, Kelly and Andrew, for joining us here. Thanks so much to all of the members for your endurance today. I will ask our chair, Sharon, if she wants to say anything before we wrap up.

AUDIENCE: [Background chatter]

SHARON: —into in the morning. Thank you, Avi. And so, I think that's it for today, unless we have any questions from anyone. OK. So, I'll just remind everybody today was the day where we heard a lot. Tomorrow is going to be a day where we work and try to figure out what we're going to do with this committee. So, have a good evening and come back tomorrow ready to talk and work. That's what we're going to be doing. Thank you.

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Yes, and we will see everyone … So, the public meeting will resume at 9 a.m. tomorrow. We will see all of the members at 8:15 a.m., again, in the [INAUDIBLE] lobby to get through the visitor's desk and to get set up up here.

AUDIENCE: Will it be fine with just leaving our items out here?

ZACHARY PRITCHARD: Yes. All right. Thank you very much.