The potential of heat pumps in the electrification of the Danish industry

Reaching the goals set by the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) requires the energy sector to have netzero CO2-emissions the latest by 2060 (Philibert, 2017). The power sector changes from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, providing increasing amounts of clean energy. The decarbonisation of the industry sector is however often overseen, despite the industry accounting for 21 % of the direct global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 (IPCC, 2014). A decarbonisation of the industry can happen on a large scale following three main technology options, (i) the replacement of fossil fuels with bioenergy, (ii) the electrification of processes and (iii) the implementation of carbon capture and storage technologies (Åhman et al., 2012). Electrification of processes reduces energy-related CO₂-emissions, but it can also reduce the final energy use by integrating heat pumps (HP). The choice of Power-to-Heat technologies generally depend on process and temperature requirements. Some promising electrification technologies, such as high temperature heat pumps (HTHP) or heat pump-assisted distillation, have currently a low technology readiness level (den Ouden et al., 2017), while other available technologies, such as electric boilers and Mechanical Vapour Recompression (MVR), can be infeasible under current economic conditions. The potential for HTHPs was investigated for the European industry (Kosmadakis, 2019), where it was found that HTHP can cover about 1.5 % of the industries heat consumption.
This work derives an overview of the potential of heat pump-based process heat supply for the electrification of thermal processes in the Danish industry.