Net zero: we need more than one technology to get there

Energy giant Eni has poured €5bn into research and development and the creation of new applications of low-carbon technologies, according to an executive. The investment, which has taken place over the past six years, aims to advance groundbreaking technologies such as wave power and magnetic confinement fusion, says Francesca Zarri, Director of Technology, R&D and Digital at Eni. It comes amid growing concern over the impact of manmade climate change.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13 contains a clear mandate to "take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts", while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has advised of the need for massive emissions reductions to limit global temperature rises to within 2ºC of pre-industrial levels. Developing a wide range of technologies is essential to meet global targets for net zero emissions by 2050, Zarri says. “We are deeply convinced that no single technological solution or energy vector can allow us, and our economies in general, to reach net zero, given that the energy landscape is too complex for this kind of simplistic approach.”

Eni was one of the first energy companies to invest in fusion, an emerging low-carbon generation technology that works on the same principle as the sun, fusing light atomic nuclei and releasing potentially vast amounts of energy in the process. If proven to be viable, fusion could provide almost unlimited clean energy.

In 2018 Eni took a stake in US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-out. CFS has successfully completed the test aiming to demonstrate the operation of the innovative magnet for plasma fusion confinement, for the first time made with HTS (High Temperature Superconductor) technology and is hoping to have a working prototype early next decade. “The extraordinary result obtained during the test demonstrates the strategic importance of our research partnerships in the energy sector and consolidates our contribution to the development of game changer technologies. Fusion represents one of Eni’s open windows on potential breakthroughs that could fundamentally change the global energy landscape in the medium term” says Zarri.

Eni has also invested in a wave energy machine developed by Wave for Energy, an offshoot of the Polytechnic University of Turin. The device, called an Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter, or ISWEC, has been operating in a pilot project off the coast of Ravenna, northeast Italy, since 2019. Models to simulate the ISWEC’s behaviour and optimise its efficiency are run on Eni in-house supercomputer, HPC5. The wave technology is “particularly suitable for providing affordable energy to remote island locations,” Zarri explains.

Eni’s investment in magnetic connfinement fusion and wave energy, along with ongoing research into biofuels, is part of moves to create what Zarri says is “a multi-vector approach to net zero”.
She adds that these big technology bets are not being made at the expense of more readily available decarbonisation tools and technologies. “While we strongly believe in the disruptive role of innovation in discovering breakthrough technologies, such as self-sustaining magnetically confined fusion, we are convinced that we can reach net zero and be carbon neutral for scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions by 2050 by transforming our processes and products through technologies that already exist today,” she says.

David Linden, Head of Energy Transition at specialist energy market-research firm Westwood Global Energy Group, agrees that it is important to develop a range of low-carbon technologies to meet the energy transition requirements of different sectors and markets: “There are multiple ways of getting to net zero by 2050."

Most decarbonisation pathways, he adds, “come up with the same conclusion: to start with, you basically should do as much as you can with what you’ve got now”. At the same time, though, most net zero pathways anticipate a need for emerging technologies, such as low-carbon hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage, to accelerate the energy transition. “The question becomes, which ones of those can you scale up sufficiently to play a role?" says Linden.

With time running out to meet the 2050 deadline for net zero emissions, Eni is working on the premise that no stone should be left unturned in the search for decarbonisation technologies that can be deployed at massive scale.