How Artificial Intelligence Is Both Driving and Derailing Decarbonization
- Training and running AI models demand vast amounts of electricity, driving up emissions and prompting new fossil-fuel power plant construction.
- Despite the risks, AI could unlock efficiencies in energy storage, smart grids, materials science, and permitting processes that accelerate the clean transition.
- Consumers currently bear the brunt of AI’s energy surge, but experts argue long-term gains in efficiency may outweigh today’s ecological and economic costs.
Will Artificial Intelligence be the downfall of the clean energy transition, or the catalyst that makes it possible? The answer is complicated, and somehow contains a bit of both. Training the large language models that power AI is incredibly energy-intensive, and as models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek become increasingly complex, each individual query can rack up a serious ecological footprint.
Already, the AI boom has seriously compromised tech sector commitments to reach carbon neutrality. Last year, Google admitted that the company’s carbon emissions had skyrocketed by 48 percent over the last five years. Google has pledged to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 but the company concedes that "as we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging."
Those rising emissions are going to have widespread impacts on whole communities, grids, and nations. Already, the rapid rise of AI has already caused the fast-tracking of new gas-fired power plants and generated serious concern for energy security in the many countries where data center growth is outpacing energy production capacity.
Plus, planning for AI’s energy needs is an incredibly tall order. The sector is undergoing rapid changes in terms of growth as well as technological evolutions and advancements. Moreover, AI companies are not required to disclose their energy use or environmental impact, and so the vast majority do not. While researchers are working hard to calculate how much energy those companies are using, we still just don’t know for certain – and the numbers are changing all the time.
But some experts think that fears over AI’s runaway energy consumption are overblown. As AI becomes more advanced and more ubiquitous, the spread of automation is expected to make nearly everything we do more efficient. Overall, this could seriously overshadow the energy use of the AI models themselves.
AI will be instrumental in improving some of industry’s most inefficient systems, like materials value chains and biotechnology. “Finding new materials, catalysts or processes that can produce stuff more efficiently is the sort of ‘’needle in a haystack’ problem that AI is ideally suited to,” reports the Financial Times.
Plus, AI will likely be instrumental in the green energy transition itself. Large language models are already being used to look for better models and materials in the burgeoning energy storage sector, for example. In addition, the United States Department of Energy (DoE) has noted that AI could be a critical component of smart grids capable of handling increasing shares of variable energies like wind and solar in our power grids. However, they concede that AI carries significant risks if deployed ‘naïvely.’ Furthermore, “machine learning could help electric utilities improve permitting and siting, reliability, resilience and grid planning,” the DoE report goes on to say.
And, at present, an argument could be made that AI is being deployed ‘naïvely’, or at the very least, with low levels of discretion. And it’s consumers that are footing the bill for all of this early-stage experimentation where seemingly everyone and every sector is just throwing AI at the wall to see what sticks. Consumers across the U.S. – and especially in regions that house a lot of data centers – can expect their energy bills to rise in response.
"We are witnessing a massive transfer of wealth from residential utility customers to large corporations—data centers and large utilities and their corporate parents, which profit from building additional energy infrastructure," Maryland People's Counsel David Lapp told Business Insider last month. "Utility regulation is failing to protect residential customers, contributing to an energy affordability crisis.”
There are certainly risks associated with this Wild West era of AI evolution – but the sector will become more sophisticated as time goes on. “It is true of course that, for climate change purposes, cutting CO? today is worth more than cutting it tomorrow,” reports the Financial Times. “But looking at the numbers at stake, if AI facilitated even modest savings on overall electricity use, it would be a net positive for the energy transition.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
The Race to Decarbonize Steel and Cement
- Steel and cement together account for nearly 14% of global energy-related emissions, making international standards and innovation critical for decarbonisation.
- Emerging technologies—from carbon-negative limestone and renewable-powered kilns to carbon capture—are gaining traction with strong investor and industry support.
- Consumer demand and partnerships, such as Sublime and Brimstone’s deals with tech companies, are helping scale cleaner cement and steel solutions despite funding challenges.
As companies worldwide invest in decarbonisation efforts, this has been found to be easier in some industries than others. In hard-to-abate industries, such as steel and cement production, it has proved extremely difficult to reduce emissions. Meanwhile, the demand for these staple building materials is increasing in line with higher spending on infrastructure projects. So, what would it take to develop the “green cement” and “sustainable steel” industries?
In 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a commentary entitled “Collaboration on steel and cement standards is crucial for global markets.” The organisation said that, together, the steel and cement industries contribute almost 14 percent of global energy-related emissions. Most countries worldwide rely on steel imports and exports, with global steel sales in 2023 totalling $1.4 trillion. This demonstrates the need for the introduction of international standards, according to the IEA.
The agency emphasised the importance of establishing standards with clear methodologies for measuring emissions and definitions for which products are considered low or near-zero emissions, as well as the use of labelling or certification systems, to help improve the transparency around how building materials are produced and associated carbon emissions.
Some regions have already begun to explore the introduction of stricter standards on hard-to-abate sectors. For example, the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is a preparatory study on iron and steel products whose results are expected to be used to establish a Delegated Act for iron and steel products within the framework of the Sustainable Products Regulation.
One of the IEA’s principal recommendations is to introduce standards that are “Globally comparable, even as they are used by different countries and stakeholders according to their own objectives.” This would increase “The coherence and reduce the reporting burden for producers and buyers operating across multiple jurisdictions, facilitates the trade of low- and near-zero emissions materials and products, and provides a common language for tracking market developments – sending a signal to global markets on the direction of travel and providing greater certainty for investments in new technologies.”
When it comes to cement, reducing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with production is no easy feat. Cement production requires temperatures above 1,400 degrees Celsius, with heat that is largely generated from fossil fuels. The heat is used to release carbon dioxide from limestone to make clinker, which is ground down to produce cement, meaning that around half of production emissions come from clinker output. Meanwhile, the demand for cement is increasing year on year, particularly in the Global South.
Despite the challenges to decarbonisation, a 2020 analysis by the venture capital firm 2150 showed that significant innovation was being seen in cement production. And when recently assessing the industry, 2150 found that over 60 companies were involved in low-carbon concrete, supported by higher levels of public and private funding. Several cement producers and users have now introduced net-zero targets, including the major production companies Holcim and Heidelberg Materials.
On the demand side, making changes such as extending the life of buildings, reusing concrete, and smarter design could cut emissions by as much as 22 percent. Meanwhile, companies such as Heimdal and SeaChange hope to use carbon-negative limestone created from the CO2 in seawater to reduce emissions, while the firms Rondo and Antora are looking into thermal energy storage to increase renewable energy use in cement production. Successfully cutting the industry’s carbon emissions is expected to require a range of actions, including switching from fossil fuels to renewable alternatives for power and heat and incorporating carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies into operations.
Meanwhile, making steel production more sustainable is complicated, but several companies have already made progress in the field. In the past half a century, the shift from traditional blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces has reduced energy use in steel production by an estimated 60 percent. Higher renewable energy use, the incorporation of CCS technologies, and greater digitalisation could help further improve efficiency and reduce emissions in the coming years.
The good news is that there is greater interest from consumers in purchasing cleaner cement and steel. In August, the cement startups Sublime Systems and Brimstone both announced new partnerships with data centre companies with the aim of decarbonising cement production operations. This gave the two companies a much-needed economic boost, following recent U.S. federal funding cuts across a range of green energy and cleantech sectors.
Sublime conducted a “pilot pour” of its fossil-fuel-free cement at a Stack Infrastructure data centre in Virginia in August as part of a demonstration project. The company makes its cement more sustainable by electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. Meanwhile, Brimstone uses carbon-free rocks instead of limestone, which it then pulverises before adding chemicals to leach out valuable minerals. Some of the compounds produced are heated in a rotary kiln to make industry-standard cement. Brimstone’s agreement is with Amazon, which reserved future supplies of Brimstone’s sustainable cement as part of the deal.
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
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