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

By Allison Gasparini

A multi-university team led by Princeton Professor Jesse Jenkins won a grant to build computational models of complex industrial processes to better understand carbon emissions from the manufacturing sector. The award, from the Schmidt Sciences Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI), will provide $3 million over five years.

Industrial production, including steel, concrete, petroleum fuels and chemicals, accounts for about 23% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. The number rises to 30% when energy used to produce the materials is included. By comprehensively representing facilities and components involved in industrial processes, the team plans to create a model to increase understanding of decarbonization options, with a focus on electrifying processes typically done with fossil fuels. Initial work will focus on the U.S. chemicals and fuels industry before expanding to India and China.

Dharik Mallapragada, assistant professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, Ruaridh Macdonald, research scientist at MIT, Joule Bergerson, professor at University of Notre Dame, and Filippo Pecci, scientist at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment and a former postdoctoral researcher in Jenkins’ lab, join Jenkins as co-principal investigators. 

For the last two years, Mallapragada, Macdonald, Pecci and Jenkins have been co-developing MacroEnergy.jl, a new open-source energy and industrial systems model, which is currently being used broadly in the Princeton-led Net-Zero Initiative ­— an international research collaboration developing detailed pathways to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for a suite of countries, including China, India, South Korea and Brazil. The same underlying model will be used in the DEVI-funded research, with the researchers planning to improve on the computational methods and develop more accurate representation of industrial processes and related decarbonization solutions. “I’m excited for funding from the Schmidt Sciences initiative to help deepen and expand our ongoing collaboration,” said Jenkins. 

The Princeton-led team is one of five collaborative research projects selected by Schmidt Sciences for a five-year funding commitment. The five projects collectively constitute the DEVI virtual institute. The initiative was founded to support researchers improving global energy models so that they “reflect the real-world constraints of grids, cities, farms, factories, and communities,” according to language from DEVI’s website.