Power-to-Future: Combining Electrification Technologies

Global warming has recently surpassed the 1.5 °C threshold, underscoring the urgency of industrial decarbonization to stay within the Paris Agreement limits. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels and a rapidly shrinking carbon budget, furthermore, highlight the inadequacy of current mitigation efforts, calling for alternative pathways beyond conventional carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Power-to-X (P2X) technologies ─ spanning electrochemical, plasma-chemical, and power-to-heat (P2H) routes ─ offer a promising route to convert renewable electricity into sustainable feedstocks and value-added chemicals. This Perspective explores how combining these electrification strategies can enhance flexibility, efficiency, and implementation across industrial processes. While replacing entire chemical plants will be economically challenging, integrating P2X and P2H in targeted process steps can deliver meaningful emission reductions. As renewable power becomes cleaner and more abundant, such hybrid approaches can enable a pragmatic transition toward a resilient, low-carbon chemical industry without disrupting existing infrastructure or efficiency gains built over decades.