Development of a modelling tool to aid the transition to carbon neutral industrial manufacturing

The European Union's aim to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 relies on reducing emissions from the industrial sector. There is a lack of guidance and technical support at the organisational level for industrial organisations, particularly for non-energy-intensive industries. Existing approaches do not offer structured pathways to carbon neutrality. This study involves the development, verification, and validation of a novel modelling tool aimed at assisting Irish industrial organisations in achieving carbon neutrality. The generated outputs are an organisation-specific carbon neutrality waterfall as the roadmap, and a financial analysis to indicate the breakeven year where the financial savings equal the investment costs of implementing the proposed measures. This modelling tool is a decision-support tool capable of scenario modelling, which provides the user with an overview of possible decarbonisation timelines and financial impacts. First, this paper presents the user-defined and built-in inputs, followed by the first-principles mathematical model that forms the basis of the modelling tool. Then, the modelling tool is verified by a code-to-code process using representative dummy data, and is found to be accurate against the mathematical model. The final step is the use of an actual dataset from an industry partner in a validation process to determine the applicability of the modelling tool to industrial organisations. It is found to be applicable in terms of the type of data output (carbon neutrality waterfall and financial analysis). However, the inaccurate negative emissions balance of the waterfall indicates that the modelling tool is not applicable in its current state; this highlights the importance of considering the interaction effects of implementing multiple emissions-reduction measures, which is the next step in the tool development. Moreover, this tool is applicable to organisations that have completed energy audits, heat studies, and renewable energy studies and have created a register of performance improvement measures that serve as the model inputs. As such, it has a niche market and represents an initial approach to carbon neutrality planning, with the future focus on expanding its applicability by developing a heuristic knowledge-based modelling tool that acts as a recommender system.