It was heralded as a technological breakthrough, and a major boost to the petrochemical industry’s green credentials. The production of basic chemicals is carried out in conditions of extreme heat – around 850 degrees Celsius – and is hugely energy-intensive. Traditionally such temperatures have been reached by using fossil fuels, but in 2024 the chemical giants BASF, SABIC and Linde inaugurated a new system which they hailed as a world first. Steam cracking – the core industrial process for breaking down hydrocarbons – would take place in a furnace using electricity from renewable sources.
Process heat – the thermal energy used during manufacturing – is industry’s single largest source of energy use. Responsible for nearly three quarters of the EU’s industrial CO₂ emissions, it has been described as having “a huge and largely untapped potential for decarbonisation”. At the launch of their demonstration plant, the three multinationals said that large-scale deployment of the steam cracking technology had the potential to slash such emissions by at least 90%. “We are getting our hands on a key technology that will help to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the chemical industry,” said BASF’s then CEO Martin Brudermüller. “The e-furnace’s technology holds huge potential for the sustainability of the global petrochemical industry,” added his counterpart at SABIC, Abdulrahman Al-Fageeh. Linde Engineering CEO Jürgen Nowicki said working together in such a way would “advance us on the journey towards net-zero CO2 emissions and climate-neutral industry”.
Most European industry relies predominantly on natural gas to power its high temperature processes: in principle less polluting than coal and oil, as well as relatively safe and easy to manage. For decades it was also cheap and plentiful – until wars launched firstly by Russia in Ukraine, and more recently by the US and Israel against Iran, created havoc with supplies, sent costs soaring, and highlighted the folly of dependence on hostile regimes. Reliance also on antiquated infrastructure with likely high leakage rates means that “when you add all of it of it together, gas might even have a higher climate impact than coal,” says Dr Matthias Rehfeldt, a researcher specialising in industrial energy at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI. He lists the advantages of electrification as delivering a large improvement in energy efficiency at relatively low temperatures, a lesser but still significant improvement at higher temperatures, and as a driver for modernisation in an energy industry where many installations are decades old. “Modernising the energy could also spill over to modernising other parts of the production lines and thus further increase efficiency; that's an opportunity for digitalisation and so on. So, this is a whole drive to modernise the entire industrial park in the EU,” he adds.
The EU Electrification Action Plan published on 17 July 2026 aims to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption from 23% currently to 32% by 2030. Matthias Rehfeldt argues that such targets can provide an incentive to use new technologies. A 2024 study carried out by his team found the technical challenges facing energy electrification in industry should be able to be addressed over the next decade, but that a key question concerned capacity. A second barrier, he says, is economic – electrification inevitably brings higher costs compared to natural gas – while a third obstacle is grid access: “If you want to electrify, even if you have efficiency improvement, you’ll still need to have a five, six, seven times increased electric grid access,” Rehfeldt says.
The EU-funded eLITHE project aims to address some of the main challenges to high-temperature heat electrification in industry. Focusing on ceramics, whose 19 million tons of annual CO2 emissions account for around 1% of the EU’s industrial total, it aims to develop efficient and safe electric alternatives to fossil-fuel based systems. It’s hoped that new systems being tested at three pilot sites – in Spain, Greece and Germany – will ensure more flexibility to expand the use of renewable energies, revolutionising the ceramics industry. Each site will demonstrate furnaces via its own specific technological methods. Castellon is developing an innovative high-temperature melting solution that will reduce direct greenhouse gases by 1,260 tons per furnace per year in Spain. The Greek site features a very different process, demonstrating key modernisations in microwave-based alumina calcination, while the German site involves converting a large chamber kiln into a hybrid furnace for brick firing.
“Each of the three pilots is very different, but for all of them there are three key parameters,” says Miguel Zarzuela of the Spanish technology centre CIRCE, and eLITHE project coordinator. “Firstly, viable technology able to reach the high temperature required by the thermal processes without corrosion or any other issues – durable, reliable and achievable electric-driven processes that can reach these temperatures. Secondly, we need to guarantee the same or better-quality properties of the materials we are producing. And thirdly we need to focus on the energy used, the efficiency and key parameters that really provide future scale-up of the processes – enough data for an industry to decide to use this process.”
“The eLITHE project addresses directly some of the concerns we had,” says Matthias Rehfeldt. “For example, we think it's important to start with hybrid solutions that gradually ramp up because this reduces the barriers that are currently there in terms of economics, grid access and so on.” Despite forming only “a small part of the puzzle” individually in the drive towards electrification, the overall value of such projects taken together is “fundamentally important”, he adds. Rehfeldt reserves judgement however on the BASF-SABIC-Linde electrically heated steam cracking furnace, saying that a fuller assessment may be possible “in a year or so, when they have some operational experience”. In April 2026 BASF celebrated the arrival of a central component for the construction of its heat pump at Ludwigshafen, describing it as “a major logistical step” in the drive for emission-free steam generation. On the general concept of electrifying process heat in steam cracking, Rehfeldt argues that although it is a step in the right direction, there is only a “partial transformation” as fossil fuels make up a large part of the feedstock. A German-Italian study of “electrification and flexibility of process heat in energy system modelling” found that more research was needed to enable a comprehensive transition to sustainable industrial heat generation.
The success of new technologies depends on access to the electricity market to meet the demand for large amounts of power, warns Miguel Zarzuela. “We are seeing an increase in the production of renewables, but the demand side is not moving into electrification at the same speed,” he says. “One is there but we need the second one to be able to access this new cheap and renewable energy.” However, plans for large electrification infrastructure projects sometimes meet widespread hostility. France plans to build a 65-kilometre high-voltage overhead power line in the south of the country, judged by President Emmanuel Macron to be “necessary” to meet increased demand and “enable the electrification of existing and future industries”. But the project, part of which is planned to run through the internationally renowned Camargue National Park, is opposed by local politicians from across the spectrum, farmers, tourism officials and environmentalists – with many calling for an alternative underground solution. “Overhead power lines are quite visible and can create resistance, we know that from a specific case in southern Germany where a project that that was designed to bring electricity from the north to the south – electricity that is needed down there – met heavy opposition,” says Matthias Rehfeldt. “Of course, even if the entire area benefits, individual people who are affected might have quite rational reasons to be against it. Underground lines are more expensive, and take more time... It is a trade-off and I wouldn't want to make that decision.”
In May 2026 the European Commission awarded €400 million to selected European projects to decarbonise heat production. Large-scale projects can involve a battle to win over public opinion, and the EU Action Plan follows a consultation period in 2025. The eLITHE project, due to run until December 2027, highlights the benefits to society of using renewable electricity by stressing its cost-effectiveness and support for green job creation. Miguel Zarzuela hopes it can serve as a blueprint for industry beyond ceramics: “After the recent wars and geopolitical events, industry has woken up because we really see a huge interest in new technologies that are not only greener but affordable. So, this is why there’s a need for alternatives to existing technologies to really have a viable future.” “We have windows of opportunity. If we don't use them there will be more fossil installations that will be in place way after 2045 or 2050,” concludes Matthias Rehfeldt. “So, it's important to electrify everything in this reinvestment cycle… If we really want to reach our climate goals in 2050, we cannot afford to delay willingly.”
Background:
eLITHE is a project funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe programme (Grant Agreement No. 101138325), coordinated by CIRCE, bringing together 18 partners from 9 European countries. Its goal is to design, implement and demonstrate new electric heating systems for high-temperature ceramic processes (>1,000 °C) — melting, calcination and firing — and to validate their flexibility for the integration of renewable energy. The project includes three industrial pilots: the electric frit furnace in Spain, a microwave-assisted alumina calciner in Greece and a hybrid tunnel kiln for structural ceramics in Germany
eLITHE contacts
Project Manager | CIRCE
Miguel Zarzuela – mzarzuela@fcirce.es
Technical Coordinator | CIRCE
Roberto Arévalo Turnes - rarevalo@fcirce.es
Communication Manager | ICONS
Silvia Prazzoli – silvia.prazzoli@icons.it
Project website: https://elithe.eu/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elithe-eu
BlueSky: eLITHE EU Project (@elithe-eu.bsky.social) — Bluesky
YouTube: @eLITHE_project