Industry 4.0 was and still is a buzzword for a purported ‘revolution’ in industrial technology, based on artificial intelligence, machine connectedness and automation. Critically, reliable and accurate sensors are used to deliver information - like the senses deliver sensations to the brain. Industry 4.0 (also known as I4.0 or I4) involves cyber-physical systems, which exist in both the physical and virtual worlds, including cyber-twins of machines that can be interrogated and experimented-upon more easily than their real-world equivalents. The machines and computers work together by using transparent data that can be used in a number of systems.
Many of the sci-fi-like aspects of Industry 4.0 are progressively becoming true, even in the cement industry. Once factories have been optimised through application of Industry 4.0 technologies and approaches, so the theory goes, they will become much more streamlined and efficient. Presumably the profit margins of producing anything in these super-efficient factories will increase and the shareholders will be able to gain a return on the employment of their capital at a faster rate. Note: with increased automation and efficiency, there may be some job losses, as knowledge is captured from experienced workers, and they are progressively replaced by automated systems.
This is a concept that is newly-popular, coming to widespread use in the mid 2010s. The revolution is under way, but already we are impatient for the next big thing. After Industry 4.0, what’s next?
I think I know - and what it is about has been represented by the quiet voice at the back of our minds for years. It’s the gorilla in the corner of the room with whom no-one wants to make eye-contact. We all know about it, but as an industry, the problem remains as yet ‘unactioned.’ The American author Upton Sinclair was prescient when he wrote ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ We all have a vested interest in not fully understanding it and not taking action on it, but the situation is changing.
I’m talking, of course, about global warming and the cement industry’s contribution to it through its production of CO2 from decarbonation of limestone. I firstly have to admit to having been a long-term sceptic about anthropogenic global warming - read back through my ‘Last Words’ over the last decade and you will see that this is so. However, in my opinion, the evidence is now overwhelming that the world is warming. The theory with the strongest empirical evidence is for a strong man-made component to the warming, through production of greenhouse gases (but complicated by parallel production of aerosols and by other effects). Our recent survey of cement industry attitudes1 showed that 88% of industry participants think global warming is real (9% not sure); 81% think that global warming is man-made (15% not sure) and that 88% of the industry thinks that we need to take action now.
After Industry 4.0, the next stage will be to put carbon at the very centre of human activity. It is becoming more central, since the cost of emitting a tonne of carbon is rapidly increasing (in Europe at least), from Euro5/t for practically the last decade, to around Euro20/t now (and forecast to go much, much higher). The cement industry will not be able to withstand a reduction in margin to this extent, and will have to pass on these extra costs. Cement will become more expensive to its final users - and despite its higher price, I think that it will still be cost-competitive with steel, wood, glass and brick construction on a full life-cycle analysis. The final users are not the concrete companies, since they are merely providing a product for builders and engineers. The final users are actually you and me - the people that pay the taxes that build bridges, hospitals and schools, and who then go on to use them. Think of it, if you will, as a tax on our personal contributions to global warming. Like it or not and believe in global warming or not, we will all pay for global warming in the end.
In a fully decarbonised economy, the production of any greenhouse gases will be illegal, at any price. This was brought home to me when discussing the clinker factor at an industry event, when it was pointed out to me that in a fully decarbonised economy, there will be no steel-industry-derived ground granulated blast furnace slag to add to blended cements, nor any coal-fired-power-station-derived fly ash: both industries will become illegal. Unless you can mine slag and ash from stockpiles, they will be forbidden, like ozone-eating CFC refrigerants are forbidden today.
What will the next low- or no-carbon-centred phase of industry be called? Industry 5.0 or 5.C? Industry 0.C or ZeroC? Zero Carbon Industry perhaps. Whatever it is called, a huge change is coming our way. Like it or not, despite our salaries depending on it, we will all be obliged to understand global warming and to act.
1 ‘Climate change views within the global cement industry,’ Global Cement Magazine, pp10-12, September 2018.
