Decarbonising industry — what each route costs
Industry is where decarbonisation stops being a matter of will and becomes a matter of arithmetic. This is that arithmetic, made movable: production cost, emissions and abatement cost for forty-six routes across eight products — hydrogen, steel, cement, ammonia, methanol, olefins, aluminium and jet fuel — with every assumption a slider you can move.
By Robin Girard, MINES Paris — PSL.
Open the current version — v2.1.
It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the single HTML file keeps working offline, on a memory stick or dropped into a course page. The application is in French for now; the English version is planned, and the assumption files already carry the English labels the figures use.
What it is for
A plant manager does not choose a route because it is clean. They choose it because of what it costs — and the point of the tool is to let a student move the handful of numbers that decide that, and watch the ranking change.
Three of them are worth the visit on their own. The price of electricity: at €70/MWh electrolytic hydrogen costs €7.1/kg against €3.3 for steam reforming; at €30/MWh it costs €4.9, and €3.6 if the electrolyser runs 90 % of the time. Hydrogen-based steel, ammonia, methanol and synthetic kerosene are only multiples of that one figure. The grid emission factor: switch from France at 56 g to the EU-27 at 240 g and the electric routes turn over — electrolysis then emits more than the reforming it replaces, and the carbon market rewards it anyway, because it prices direct emissions and the electric route has moved its own onto the grid. The price of coking coal: the blast furnace looks cheap until you give it the price coking coal actually trades at.
Each product tab opens on three such manipulations, and a Compare tab ranks all forty-six routes by abatement cost and by how much of their cost is electricity.
Why it is worth checking
Every assumption lives in a YAML file with its unit, its bounds, its source, its status and a note — not in a spreadsheet cell. The Python engine, the JavaScript engine running in the page and the Sources tab all read those same files, so a value shown and a value used cannot differ. The two engines are compared on 46 routes at every build, and the build fails if they disagree.
What is not known is written down as such: a status marks the figures that are still orders of magnitude rather than sourced values, and the ones kept for want of better while known to be wrong. Costs come from pommes-industry, the techno-economic model of the PERSEE centre, for France in 2030 — except the electrolyser, set since v2.1 on the IEA’s Global Hydrogen Review 2026 (installed costs of 2025).
If a number looks wrong to you, that is a contribution — the repository takes issues.
Source code, model, assumptions, data and figures: git.persee.minesparis.psl.eu/energy-alternatives/industry_decarbo_routes
Versions
Each minor release keeps its own permanent link, so a result quoted in a class still opens against the model it was computed on.
Page updated 2026-10-10.