巴西工业脱碳无“银弹”，中资高耗能企业需关注流程改造与储能

Ricardo Cardoso (Klabin, left), Carlos José Grillo (WEG), Marisete Dadald Pereira (Abrage), and João Sorima (O Globo) Gabriel Reis/Valor Having one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world has not been enough to guarantee a competitive advantage for Brazilian industry. After expanding the share of renewable sources in power generation, the challenge now is to turn that advantage into competitiveness. The topic was discussed at the event “Energy Transition – Energy and Industry: how to decarbonize without losing competitiveness,” organized by Valor and O Globo in São Paulo. Executives from industry, the electricity sector, and business groups argued that decarbonization will require different solutions for each economic activity. “There will be no silver bullet. What you have is a sequence of coordinated actions,” said Rodrigo Lauria, climate change and decarbonization director at Vale. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), industry accounts for about one-quarter of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Brazil starts from a favorable position because it has one of the most renewable electricity grids in the world. That, however, does not eliminate the challenges facing the most energy-intensive industrial sectors. Reducing emissions in aluminum, for example, also depends on transforming production processes. “In Brazil’s case, we have a competitive advantage because our energy grid already reduces an important share of emissions. But does that mean our decarbonization exercise is over? No,” said Janaína Donas, CEO of the Brazilian Aluminum Association (Abal). According to her, many technologies have still not reached the necessary scale, requiring companies to “reinvent the wheel, reinvent the business.” To identify where efforts should be concentrated, the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development (CEBDS) brought together companies, associations, universities, and research centers to map opportunities to reduce emissions across several production chains. “Often, four key measures were responsible for 70% of decarbonization. In agribusiness, four measures accounted for 80%,” said Alessandra Fajardo, the organization’s technical executive director. In her view, the study showed that each sector will have its own path to reducing emissions. The advance of renewable generation also brings new challenges. With the expansion of solar and wind power, energy storage and grid stability have increasingly come to the fore in sector discussions. “In wind and solar energy, nature calls the shots. The solution is storage. And the best way to store energy today is batteries,” said Carlos José Bastos Grillo, vice president of technology at WEG. The need to expand infrastructure was also highlighted by Marisete Dadald Pereira, president of the Brazilian Association of Electric Power Generation Companies (Abrage). “You have to expand the system while considering all the systemic resources it needs to ensure safety and reliability,” she said. According to her, the expansion of renewable sources has made energy a strategic factor for competitiveness and reinforced the importance of storage solutions, such as pumped-storage hydropower. Another challenge pointed out by participants is financing the transition. “Is there money? Yes. But it often does not perfectly match the need,” Fajardo said. Many projects, she said, run into the minimum scale required by financiers or the difficulty of allocating risk between investors and companies, which slows the adoption of new technologies. “The decarbonization agenda is not just an emissions-reduction agenda. Above all, it is a competitiveness agenda,” Lauria said. According to him, reducing the carbon intensity of products tends to become a commercial advantage as new markets begin to incorporate environmental criteria into purchasing decisions. For Ricardo Cardoso, industrial, engineering, and projects executive director at Klabin, progress on decarbonization will depend on combining new technologies with gains in operational efficiency. The company has been replacing fuel oil with biomass gasification and expanding the use of renewable raw materials. “We were able to reduce fuel-oil consumption by more than 20,000 tonnes at a specific plant,” he said. Workforce training is another bottleneck for the energy transition in Brazil. Cardoso said more sophisticated technologies require increasingly specialized professionals. At the same time, Grillo noted that the shortage of qualified workers affects virtually every industrial sector. For the WEG executive, “there is no more democratic problem” for industry than the lack of qualified labor. According to him, the company has invested for decades in training programs, now focused mainly on areas such as artificial intelligence, electronics, and connectivity. Pereira said expanding investments will also be decisive for training specialized professionals. According to her, without new projects, the electricity sector loses its ability to retain technical knowledge. “We have a duty to provide the system with opportunities for new investments to retain this knowledge, which is only developed through practical application in projects,” she said. Although they addressed different realities, participants converged on the view that industrial decarbonization is unlikely to follow a single path. “This effort toward energy transition and decarbonization does not have a single solution. It is a set of solutions,” summarized Donas, of Abal. Fajardo, of CEBDS, reinforced the same idea, arguing that each production chain should focus its efforts on measures capable of generating the greatest impact. “It is up to each industry to see where it needs to act and what works for it.” The debate was moderated by Rafael Vázquez, a Valor reporter, and João Sorima, a journalist at O Globo. The Energy Transition project is an initiative of the newspapers Valor and O Globo, sponsored by Vale. Translation: Todd Harkin