ICEF develops roadmaps on how key innovative technologies can contribute to a transition to clean energy. Roadmaps consider industrial, academic and governmental perspectives to identify a realistic, fact-based pathway and meaningfully inform the work of all stakeholders.
ICEF roadmaps are collaborative documents developed from the concurrent sessions in our annual conference and refined by reviews and suggestions from specialists.
Innovation for Cool Earth Forum (ICEF) publishes innovation roadmaps for carbon dioxide utilization and energy storage and other technologies with the potential to contribute significantly to long-term Net Zero Emissions.
ICEF Roadmap Anniversary Booklet
An anniversary booklet has been published to mark the 10th ICEF Roadmap (Low-carbon Ammonia). Please refer to the link below.
ICEF Roadmap Anniversary Booklet
This ICEF roadmap explores the potential for low-carbon ammonia, such as blue ammonia and green ammonia, to play an important role in helping decarbonize a number of sectors including agriculture, shipping, industry and power. The roadmap examines the global ammonia industry today, low-carbon production options, infrastructure needs, potential uses for low-carbon ammonia, safety and local environmental issues, R&D needs and policy options.
The final version of the Roadmap “Low-Carbon Ammonia” was presented in the seminar held at the COP27 Japan Pavilion.
This ICEF Blue Carbon Roadmap summarizes the potential of blue carbon as one of the negative emission technologies to achieve net-zero emissions. In the roadmap, blue carbon is defined as the CO2 captured and stored by mangroves, tidal marshes, seagrass beds, and natural macroalgae beds as well as macroalgal farming such as kelp and sargassum. The mitigation potential of blue carbon globally is estimated at 0.5-1.38 GtCO2e/year by the year 2050. The roadmap summarizes the scientific knowledge currently available, areas of research and development expected in the future, and institutional, policy, and environmental considerations that may arise in the future. It then presents pathways to increase blue carbon absorption and reduce emissions from the loss of the ecosystems.
COP26 Japan Pavilion Event Archived Video
YouTubeThis ninth ICEF roadmap explores a topic that has received too little attention: the potential for carbon mineralization to play an important role in helping fight climate change.
Carbon mineralization is a natural process in which carbon dioxide (CO2) becomes bound in rocks as a solid mineral, permanently removing the CO2 from the atmosphere. This process could provide the foundation for a range of activities that not only help fight climate change, but create jobs and deliver local environmental benefits as well. Resources for carbon mineralization are abundant and located in dozens of countries around the world.
The final version of the Roadmap “Carbon Mineralization” was presented at the COP26 Virtual Japan Pavilion.
Archived Video is here.
This roadmap explores ways to use biomass to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store that CO2 underground or in durable products.
We introduce a new term -- biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) – which we believe better describes this topic than the traditional term -- bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
The roadmap explores questions including:
Roughly 10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from the production of heat for industrial processes - more than GHG emissions from cars and planes combined. Decarbonizing industrial heat production will be essential to meeting the goals set forth in the Paris Agreement, including achieving net zero emissions in the second half of this century, yet technological approaches for decarbonizing industrial heat production are far from maturity. This topic has received far less attention than decarbonization of the power, transport and building sectors.
This Roadmap explores the challenge of industrial heat decarbonization. After providing general background, we discuss four technological approaches for providing low-carbon industrial heat: hydrogen; biomass; electrification; and CCUS. We next examine decarbonizing heat production in the cement, iron and steel, and chemical industries. We then turn to policy options and an innovation agenda. We close with findings and recommendations.
The IPCC(*) and many scholars agree that achieving a 2 degree C climate stabilization target will be extremely challenging through mitigation efforts alone and will likely require removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere at the scale of many gigatons. This number is daunting, but many approaches have been proposed for Negative Emission Technologies (NETs), including land-use techniques, re- and afforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration and direct air capture (DAC). The technological status of DAC is very early-stage, with no significant dedicated research, development and deployment (RD&D) programs and only a handful of pilot-scale facilities currently operating.
*Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
This roadmap will explore the portfolio of NETs in under 2 degree C scenarios, DAC technologies and their status, long-term goals for DAC (e.g. economic viability, ensuring net CO₂ removal from the use of DAC and CO₂ utilization, role of renewable electricity, RD&D targets) and policy support.
This roadmap builds on ICEF’s previous work to fill the gap on the viability of the potentially high-impact CO2U technology, stressing the need for life-cycle analysis and exploring effective policies to promote CO2U.
It focuses on concrete & carbonate materials (near-term market), commodity chemicals (near- and medium- term market) and durable carbon materials (small market today but potential large long-term market).
This study examines the current statuses and timelines of three potentially attractive areas of energy storage that can have a high impact on energy system transformation.
These are: stationary electric energy storage to ensure power system flexibility, mobility electric energy storage as key to the transportation electrification, and stationary thermal energy storage storing renewable or environmental heat.
A recent study found carbon dioxide utilization (CO2U) technologies have the potential to reduce global carbon emissions over 10% by 2030. This study presents a roadmap for the commercialization of carbon dioxide CO2U technologies through 2030 by assessing almost 180 global technology developers.
This presents a ZEB/ZEH roadmap for different climate zones taking into account the neglected factor of humidity in air conditioning, especially in humid areas in Asia where energy demand is set to increase substantially. Four technology categories are proposed with timescales: passive (building envelope), active (equipment), renewable energy integration and energy management.
This study examines the potential and difficulties of deploying distributed solar and storage technologies together and provides roadmaps for Japan, Germany, the USA, China and India for taking advantage of the opportunities solar and storage offer.
