The Germany boss of the US manufacturer Dow would like to see more cooperation between companies in the green conversion.
(Photo: Marc-André Hergenröder)
Dusseldorf Global warming is often cited as perhaps humanity’s greatest crisis. Nonetheless, given the short-term threats to prosperity in Europe, the issue seems to have receded into the background of late. Instead of switching to climate-neutral production processes, after the war in Ukraine and the interruption of Russian gas supplies, a secure supply of fossil fuels is high on the to-do lists of politicians and companies.
But the situation is more complex than it appears, the companies conveyed at the Handelsblatt annual conference “Decarbonization in Industry” on Thursday. “We want to make our entire supply chain CO2-free by 2040 at the latest,” said Klemens Haselsteiner, currently a member of the board of construction company Strabag, who, as a member of the owner family, is to switch to the chairmanship of the board next year.
In a survey conducted during the event, the participants in the conference were almost entirely convinced: the green transformation has not lost any of its importance at management levels. On the other hand, there were doubts about the answer to the question of whether the green conversion would succeed and at the same time prosperity would be maintained.
The hurdles that companies have to overcome when it comes to decarbonization are high. The construction industry, for example, is currently responsible for around 38 percent of global CO2 emissions and for almost half of global raw material consumption. But your transformation process is still in its infancy. One of the biggest problems is the decarbonization of cement production: Here, CO2 is currently produced as a process gas during production. This cannot be eliminated by switching to green energy.
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Many other industrial sectors are in a similar situation. In the production of many metals, for example, the emission of CO2 is also inextricably linked to the manufacturing process, in the case of steel, for example. Or a large amount of gas is needed to heat metal products for further processing.
Innovative companies: bridge solution with blue ammonia
The copper manufacturer Aurubis shows that a transformation is technically possible. The Hamburg company is currently testing the use of so-called blue ammonia to replace natural gas. The energy carrier is supplied by the state-owned oil company Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), which produces the ammonia from hydrogen that is produced during natural gas production.
This means that the production is not climate-neutral. However, the blue ammonia offers the copper smelter a bridge. Aurubis can already convert its own processes to use green ammonia. This is produced using renewable energies, but is not yet available on the market in sufficient quantities.
The biggest hurdle was not the investment in the new test capacities themselves, but the bureaucratic effort in advance, explains Aurubis CEO Roland Harings. “When we started the project, we were told that the approval process would take at least two years.” For comparison, he cited a much larger investment project in the USA that was fully approved after just seven months.
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Strabag boss Haselsteiner also sees German and European regulation as a frequent obstacle. “Federalism is a brake,” criticized the family entrepreneur. This applies, for example, to building regulations, but also to the expansion of renewable energies and the opaque subsidy landscape, which often makes it difficult for companies to plan their investments over the long term.
Companies from the chemical industry experience this as well. But there, too, the conviction prevails that the green conversion should be pushed forward with full force – at least among the large companies. “We must not stop the transformation now. The customers demand this, the talents and employees as well as the legislator,” said Katja Wodjereck, Germany boss of the US chemical company Dow Chemical.
Like many managers at the Handelsblatt conference, she spoke out in favor of more cooperation between companies in the green conversion – within the sectors, but also with a view to customers and other industries. “We all face the same challenges and can learn a lot from each other.”
More: How BASF, Sabic and Linde want to make the heart of chemistry CO2-free