Factors driving the decarbonisation of industrial clusters: A rapid evidence assessment of international experience

Reducing industrial emissions to achieve net-zero targets by the middle of the century will require profound and sustained changes to how energy intensive industries operate. Preliminary activity is now underway, with governments of several developed economies starting to implement policy and providing funding to support the deployment of low carbon infrastructure into high emitting industrial clusters. While clusters appear to offer the economies of scale and institutional capacity needed to kick-start the industrial transition, to date there has been little systematic assessment of the factors that may influence the success of these initiatives. Drawing from academic and grey literature, this paper presents a rapid evidence assessment of the approaches being used to drive the development of low carbon industrial clusters internationally. Many projects are still at the scoping stage, but it is apparent that current initiatives focus on the deployment of carbon capture technologies, alongside hydrogen as a future secondary revenue stream. This model of decarbonisation funnels investment into large coastal clusters with access to low carbon electricity and tends to obscure questions about the integration of these technologies with other decarbonisation interventions, such as material efficiency and electrification. The technology focus also omits the importance that a favourable location and shared history and culture appears to have played in helping progress the most advanced initiatives; factors that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. If clusters are to kick-start the low-carbon industrial transition, then greater attention is needed to the social and political dimensions of this process and to a broader range of decarbonisation interventions and cluster types than represented by current projects.