The Energy Seminar | Decarbonizing the Industrial Sector | Jeffrey Rissman, Senior Director, Industry Program, Energy Innovation

Abstract: Jeff Rissman will draw from his new book, Zero-Carbon Industry, exploring the pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial sector. Accounting for a third of global emissions when including purchased electricity and heat, decarbonizing the industrial sector is a key part of reaching nations’ net zero targets. The talk will provide an overview of emissions and energy use in global industrial sector, the key technologies that can aid in reducing industrial emissions to zero, and discuss the necessary policy frameworks to help commercialize these technologies and deliver them at scale.

Bio: Jeffrey Rissman is Senior Director, Industry at Energy Innovation, where he leads the company’s work on technologies and policies to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the industry sector. He is the author of Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity (2024) and coauthor of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy (2018). In 2024, Jeffrey was appointed by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to serve on the Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee.

Jeff is also the creator of the Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model that quantifies the effects of various energy and environmental policies in combination, predicting outputs such as fuel use, pollutant emissions, financial cost or savings, electric vehicle deployment, power sector structure, and more. Versions of the simulator have been developed for an ever-growing list of countries and regions, in partnership with in-country government agencies or NGOs, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world’s emissions.

Previously, Jeff worked on policies supporting R&D for clean energy and efficiency technologies for the American Energy Innovation Council, where he led a survey of 17 R&D leaders investigating trends, opportunities, and challenges to unleashing private sector energy R&D.

Jeff holds an M.S. in Environmental Sciences and Engineering and a Masters in City and Regional Planning, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a Research Fellow for the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, where he studied aircraft emissions for the Federal Aviation Administration. Jeff also holds a B.A. in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.