Princeton-led consortium to find solutions to U.S. industrial emissions with funding from Schmidt Sciences

Assistant Professor Dharik Mallapragada is part of a five-university team that just won funding from Schmidt Sciences to tackle decarbonizing industrial emissions

Steel, chemicals, ammonia, ethylene — these industries are notoriously hard to electrify, and account for up to 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions once the energy used to produce them is included. They've also historically been too complex to model alongside national energy systems.

Mallapragada joins Princeton's Jesse Jenkins — the project's Principal Investigator — and MIT's Ruaridh Macdonald, Notre Dame's Joule Bergerson, and RFF-CMCC's Filippo Pecci as other co-PIs on the project, one of five inaugural grants from Schmidt Sciences' new Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI).

The team will build on MacroEnergy.jl, the open-source energy systems model Mallapragada and collaborators have spent the past two years developing, to create computationally-efficient models to study industrial decarbonization in detail, and their interaction with the broader energy system. Initial work focuses on the U.S. chemicals and fuels sector, with planned extensions to India and China.

Industrial sectors like chemicals and fuels are among the toughest to decarbonize owing to the many inter-dependent processes and products, and few modeling tools today capture this complexity to inform realistic transition planning," said Mallapragada. "This project lets us bring the same level of rigor we've applied to the power sector and hydrogen infrastructure planning to industrial decarbonization, starting in the U.S. and extending to countries like India and China where industrial growth and emissions reduction have to happen together."