Zero Emissions Industrial Technologies (ZEnITh)

Industry accounts for around 15% of the EU’s total emissions, with Energy-Intensive Industries (EIIs) representing more than half of the industrial energy consumption. These sectors – including aluminium, steel, cement, lime, chemicals, etc. – rely heavily on thermal energy, with 66% of industrial energy use dedicated to process heating, 37% of which requires temperatures below 200 °C. Ensuring a sustainable supply of heat is therefore central to any decarbonization strategy. However, several challenges persist: variability of industrial processes and difficulties in integration for retrofit solutions; need of ad hoc design of generation technologies and difficulty in replicability; imbalance between sustainable energy supply and availability, and energy demands; economic feasibility and competitiveness with traditional technologies and political barriers; lack of awareness and skepticism among final users and value chain stakeholders (e.g. engineering companies/installers, etc.); lack of ommon language among the actors and real co-creation activities. The ZEnITh (Zero Emissions Industrial Technologies) project addresses these challenges with an integrated plug-and-play solution combining High Temperature Heat Pumps, Latent Thermal Energy Storages and AI-based Industrial Energy Management System, to enable efficient, flexible, and replicable decarbonization of industrial thermal processes. By actively involving manufacturers of EU Net Zero Technologies (NZTs) and all stakeholders from early stages, ZEnITh aims to build a resilient and profitable market for NZTs. Besides, the system supports integration with renewable energy sources such as PV panels and battery storage, as well as emerging technologies like mechanical vapour recompression. The proposed solution will be validated by testing in a real-world EII process in an aluminium manufacturing plant. In doing so, ZEnITh paves the way for a sustainable, competitive, and scalable pathway to reduce emission EEIs.