Undertaking the Challenge of Transforming Energy Systems to Achieve a Carbon-neutral Society

In order to achieve a sustainable society, it is crucial to consider carbon neutrality, circular economy, and nature positivity. This will help mitigate climate change, utilize resources efficiently, and improve the long-term impact on biodiversity, respectively.
Implementing these concepts in society requires an economic perspective. Understanding the interactions among environmental and societal elements is essential to achieving these goals. Therefore, our focus is on scenario analysis using the "Integrated Assessment Modeling“, which creates future scenarios and enables the quantitative examination of the resulting images.
This approach allows us to simulate the impact of various measures and technologies on society and nature and provides information for objective discussions about the future. For instance, we are developing guidelines for technological development, including energy operation planning, facility planning, and social infrastructure development, to enhance the convenience of electric vehicles.

Realizing factories that do not emit CO₂ requires an understanding of energy flows throughout entire factories as systems. We therefore develop system design technologies that optimize factory facility configurations using a mathematical approach, as well as system management technologies that optimally operate individual facilities in accordance with fluctuations in production and in energy supply and demand. We also conduct empirical research in this area using digital twins. Through these efforts, we aim to improve the efficiency of renewable energy use at minimum cost.

We are working to construct a CO₂ recovery and methanation system (C-LOOP®) . Specifically, this system synthesizes methane from CO₂ recovered from production facility exhaust gases and hydrogen derived from renewable energy. Along with an energy management technology for balancing CO₂ emissions, which vary depending on the operating status of facilities, with hydrogen generation, which varies depending on fluctuations in renewable energy power, the system efficiently employs CO₂ recovery and storage to realize stability throughout the system.

Achieving a carbon-neutral society requires efforts to avoid increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere over the life cycle of fuels. Hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuel, and other carbon-neutral fuels derived from renewable energy sources are therefore attracting attention as one means of achieving this goal. In order to draw out and fully utilize the advantages of carbon-neutral fuels, we are constructing technologies that analyze combustion characteristics and visualize reactions for various types of fuels by developing a reaction simulation technology that is based on molecular dynamics and the combustion and fluid simulation technologies we have cultivated over the years.

A large part of the energy wasted in factories is discharged as heat, and reducing this waste heat is an important aspect of achieving energy savings in factories.Therefore, we are developing heat management technologies to fully leverage heat as energy throughout factories by efficiently using heat in production processes as well as by recovering and reusing waste heat.We are also developing chemical processes that supply heat and capture CO₂ based on renewable energy-derived fuels and are working to demonstrate technologies involving control of various processes in an integrated manner based on heat supply and demand forecasting.