Andres Clarens, University of Virginia

The U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to claw back $ 3.7 billion in grants from industrial demonstration projects may create an unexpected opportunity for American manufacturing.

Many of the grant recipients were deploying carbon capture and storage technologies that are designed to prevent industrial carbon pollution from entering the atmosphere by capturing it and injecting it deep underground. The approach has long been considered critical for reducing the contributions chemicals, cement production, and other heavy industries make to climate change.

However, the U.S. policy reversal could paradoxically accelerate emissions cuts from the industrial sector.

An emissions reality check

Heavy industry is widely regarded as the most challenging sector of the economy to clean up.

The U.S. power sector has made significant progress, reducing emissions by 35% since 2005 as coal-fired power plants have been replaced with cheaper natural gas, solar, and wind energy sources. More than 93% of new grid capacity installed in the U.S. in 2025 was forecasted to be solar, wind, and battery-based. In the transportation sector, electric vehicles are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. automotive market, leading to significant reductions in pollution.

However, U.S. industrial emissions have remained essentially unchanged, in part due to the massive amounts of coal, gas, and oil required to produce steel, concrete, aluminum, glass, and chemicals. Together, these materials account for approximately 22% of the U.S.‘s greenhouse gas emissions.

The global industrial landscape is changing, though, and U.S. industries cannot, in isolation, expect that yesterday’s means of production will be able to compete in a global marketplace.

Even without domestic mandates to reduce their emissions, U.S. industries face powerful economic pressures. The EU’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism imposes a tax on the emissions associated with imported steel, chemicals, cement, and aluminum entering European markets. Similar policies are being considered by Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, and were even floated in the United States.

The false promise of carbon capture

The appeal of carbon capture and storage, in theory, was that it could be bolted on to an existing factory with minimal changes to the core process, and the carbon pollution would go away.

Government incentives for carbon capture enable producers to continue using polluting technologies, thereby propelling gas-powered chemical production and coal-powered concrete production.

The Trump administration’s pullback of carbon capture and storage grants now removes some of these artificial supports.

Without the expectation that carbon capture will help them meet regulations, this may create space to focus on materials breakthroughs that could revolutionize manufacturing while solving industries’ emissions problems.

The materials innovation opportunity

So, what might emissions-lowering innovation look like for industries such as cement, steel, and chemicals? As a civil and environmental engineer with experience in federal industrial policy, I examine the ways these industries intersect with U.S. economic competitiveness and our built environment.

There are many examples of U.S. innovation to be excited about. Consider just a few industries:

Cement: Cement is one of the most widely used materials on Earth, but the technology has changed little over the past 150 years. Today, its production generates roughly 8% of total global carbon pollution. If cement production were a country, it would rank third globally after China and the United States.

Researchers are exploring methods to create concrete that can dissipate heat or be lighter in weight, thereby significantly reducing the cost of building and cooling a home. Sublime Systems has developed a method to produce cement using electricity instead of coal or gas. The company lost its IDP grant in May 2025; however, it has since entered into a new agreement with Microsoft.

Making concrete do more could accelerate the transition. Researchers at Stanford and separately at MIT are developing concrete that can act as a capacitor and store over 10 kilowatt-hours of energy per cubic meter. Such materials could potentially store electricity from your solar roof or enable roadways that charge cars in motion.

Technologies like these could give U.S. companies a competitive advantage while lowering emissions. Heat-shedding concrete cuts air conditioning demand, lighter formulations require less material per structure, and energy-storing concrete could potentially replace carbon-intensive battery manufacturing.

Steel and iron: Steel and iron production generate about 7% of global emissions with centuries-old blast furnace processes that use intense heat to melt iron ore and burn off impurities. A hydrogen-based steelmaking alternative exists today that emits only water vapor, but it requires new supply chains, infrastructure, and production techniques.

U.S. Steel has been developing techniques to create stronger microstructures within steel, enabling the construction of structures with 50% less material and greater strength than conventional designs when a skyscraper needs that much less steel to achieve the same structural integrity, that eliminates millions of tons of iron ore mining, coal-fired blast furnace operations and transportation emissions.

Chemicals: Chemical manufacturing has created simultaneous crises over the past 50 years. PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” and microplastics have been detected in human blood and across ecosystems, and the industry generates a significant share of U.S. industrial emissions.

Companies are developing ways to produce chemicals using engineered enzymes instead of traditional petrochemical processes, achieving 90% lower emissions in a way that could reduce production costs. These bio-based chemicals can naturally biodegrade, and the chemical processes operate at room temperature, eliminating the need for high heat and the associated energy consumption.

Is there a silver bullet without carbon capture?

While carbon capture and storage might not be the silver bullet for reducing emissions that many people thought it would be, new technologies for managing industrial heat might turn out to be the closest thing to one.

Most industrial processes require temperatures between 300 and 1830 degrees Fahrenheit (150 and 1000 degrees Celsius for everything from food processing to steel production. Currently, industries burn fossil fuels directly to generate this heat, creating emissions that electric alternatives cannot easily replace. Heat batteries may offer a breakthrough solution by storing renewable electricity as thermal energy, then releasing that heat on demand for industrial processes.

Companies such as Rondo Energy are developing systems that store wind and solar power in brick-like materials heated to extremely high temperatures. Essentially, they convert electricity into heat during times when electricity is abundant, usually at night. A manufacturing facility can later utilize that heat, which allows it to reduce energy costs and improve grid reliability by not drawing power at peak times. The Trump administration cut funding for projects working with Rondo’s technology, but the company’s products are being tested in other countries.

Industrial heat pumps provide another pathway by amplifying waste heat to reach the high temperatures required for manufacturing, without using as much fossil fuel.

The path forward

The Department of Energy’s decision forces industrial America into a defining moment. One path leads backward toward pollution-intensive business as usual, propping up obsolete processes. The other path drives forward through innovation.

Carbon capture offered an expensive Band-Aid on old technology. Investing in materials innovation and new techniques for making them promises fundamental transformation for the future.

Andres Clarens, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.