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This review highlights innovations in electrification and chemical conversion for decarbonization, indicating practical implications.
The chemical industry faces increasing pressure to decarbonize due to its high energy intensity and substantial greenhouse gas emissions. Electrification, replacing fossil fuel–based process heat with renewable electricity, is a key pathway toward sustainable chemical manufacturing. This review outlines recent advances in electrified chemical conversion technologies, categorized into direct (e.g., resistive, inductive, microwave, plasma) and indirect (e.g., electricity-derived hydrogen or syngas) approaches. Their principles, heat and mass transfer characteristics, advantages, limitations, and scalability are discussed. Emerging methods such as microwave-initiated plastic depolymerization, programmable heating and quenching for methane conversion, and inductive heating for hydrogen release from liquid organic hydrogen carriers are highlighted for their selectivity and energy efficiency. Realizing the full potential of electrification requires convergence across materials science, electrical engineering, and reaction engineering. This review provides a framework for evaluating the readiness, implementation barriers, and trade-offs in performance, economics, and emissions of electrified chemical technologies.
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Kang et al. (2025) studied this question.
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