The French newspaper Le Figaro, in a report by authors Guillaume Guichard and Valerie Colette, said that time is running out in the face of global warming, and that technologies must advance rapidly, noting that carbon neutrality seems possible around 2050.

Carbon neutrality means achieving equality between the carbon added to the atmosphere from the products of energy use and natural biological processes on the one hand, and the carbon consumed in processes such as photosynthesis in plants.

The estimation for achieving carbon neutrality is based on the following five techniques:

Carbon dioxide capture and storage

The report stated that the Dunkirk steel plant of Arslor Mittal will host the end of 2021 the "Dynamic X" experiment to test the capture of carbon dioxide emitted from the blast furnace, and noted that the advantage of this process is to reduce the cost of carbon capture, which is still very high by 30%.

It would then be necessary to store the "captured" carbon, which could then be offloaded in pipelines to the port terminal or directly to an underground storage site, but such infrastructure would not be possible outside of industrial hubs that combined many large energy emitters. Be it steel plants, cement plants or incinerators.

According to the report, a ton of carbon dioxide captured will cost between 65 and 150 dollars, but in the long run, carbon dioxide will also be captured directly from the surrounding air, as many companies are working on this, such as the Canadian Carbon Engineering Company and the Swiss company Claymorex. , which is currently building a test site in Iceland.

And in 2035, it will be necessary - as the authors say - to have the ability to absorb a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions, or 4 gigatons, and up to 7 gigatons in 2050, or all the emissions that humanity has failed to eliminate completely.

Lithium batteries are still used in cars today (Shutterstock)

More durable batteries

The lithium battery is still used today in the car, but several companies are working on the technology of the so-called "solid battery", which is expected to be launched in 2026 or 2028, "and we will reach - as Olivier Amel, program manager of the French company SAFT - expects to reach 1,000 kilometers with individual cars." without recharging.

French start-up Tiamat is also betting on another chemistry, sodium ion, which is more interesting because its component is manufactured, and requires no cobalt, nickel or lithium, and those rare metals are difficult to obtain, and the company will market its first sodium-ion batteries in the next two years.

Carbon-free hydrogen, produced from renewable energy, will be one of the main energy carriers (Shutterstock)

cheap green hydrogen

Because electricity can be stored in some way, carbon-free hydrogen, produced from renewable energy or nuclear power, will be one of the major energy carriers after 2030 for chemicals, industry, and heavy transport. Liten) "breakthrough" technology after 10 years of research, to achieve this by high-temperature electrolysis.

To move to the commercial stage, the researchers created a joint venture with a number of industrialists that aims to achieve price parity by 2030, with hydrogen that is very cheap and very polluting because it is produced from fossil fuels.

For centuries steel has been made from coke, which is a very polluting substance (Shutterstock)

Decarbonization of steel production

For centuries, steel was made from coke, which is a highly polluting substance because it comes from coal. As a result, the steel industry has been known to be responsible for about 5 to 7 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Boston Metal plans to decarbonize steel production.

Two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who won 10 years ago the US Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) tender to extract oxygen from the moon's surface - realized that their process could be applied in the field of steelmaking, and they succeeded thanks to a new technology applied to coal, but the issue is still for Boston Metal is in lab testing.

The international ITER project is expected to reach the integration target before 2040 (Reuters)

towards integration

For decades, researchers have attempted to generate star-like energy through nuclear fusion, and the large-scale international Iter project in southern France is expected to reach the fusion goal shortly before 2040, noting that the many other initiatives Younger ones in the public and private sectors promise results within 10 to 20 years.

The development of the first reactor of this type is very important, but the deployment of a fleet of reactors will take a long time, and assuming that integration continues at the pace of solar energy deployment, this technology could represent 1% of global energy demand around 2090.