Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership

Green Growth Summit 2026: Ramon Arratia, Chief Sustainabilty Officer, Ball Corporation

Duration: 4:22 547 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Electrification and circularity are presented as a powerful dual strategy essential for achieving energy independence, particularly within the context of decarbonizing industrial demand. In the realm of aluminum packaging, significant progress has been made regarding collection rates, with projections indicating that 90% of cans will be collected before 2030 due to efforts aligned with regulations like PPWR. However, maintaining this circularity requires ensuring that aluminum scrap remains within Europe rather than leaving the continent, a goal that may necessitate implementing duties to keep these materials local. This focus on recycling is critical because using recycled aluminum consumes 95% less electricity than producing primary aluminum, demonstrating how circularity inherently delivers substantial efficiency gains even before full electrification of industrial processes is realized. Transitioning to the electrification of heavy industry presents unique challenges that depend heavily on factors such as temperature and specific material requirements. For instance, plasma burners offer a promising solution for electrifying aluminum remelting, though scaling this approach requires addressing broader economic and infrastructural hurdles. Currently, electricity is taxed more heavily than gas in many regions, which creates a financial disincentive for industries to switch; therefore, removing these taxes is vital to make electrification economically viable. Beyond tax reform, there is an urgent need to accelerate the development of enabling technologies that improve the efficiency of industrial heating and power processes, ensuring that electrification becomes a practical and cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels. The successful implementation of this electrification agenda also hinges on solving critical issues related to grid access and infrastructure investment. As demand surges from new sectors like artificial intelligence and the transport industry, many regions are already facing difficulties in accessing sufficient electricity to support these needs. To scale up electrification effectively, substantial investments must be made into the power grid, a domain where European technology plays a significant role alongside battery innovations for transport. Since Europe is not an energy-rich region, relying on local resources through circularity and electrification is necessary to reduce the massive dependency on importing over 400 billion euros worth of energy and materials annually. Ultimately, combining these strategies will allow Europe to leverage its own technological strengths in industrial electrification and grid management while minimizing reliance on external imports.

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Electrification and circularity are the double whammy for energy independence because uh we need to electrify uh industry demand to decarbonize and uh also part of that is increasing circularity of materials. For example, in aluminum packaging, there has been a lot of really good work around PPWR. So that we believe that before 2030, we will achieve 90% of collection of cans. Now we need to be careful that uh those that aluminum scrap is not leaving Europe. So now uh there is the possibility of uh playing with a perhaps a duty to uh maintain uh part of that scrap in Europe. So u circularity is really important and then it's about electrification as well. Recycled aluminum uses 95% less electricity than primary. So already circularity delivers that efficiency. Now how do we electrify industrial processes. So it depends obviously on the temperature. Um it depends u on on on the different material and we believe that aluminum remelting for example has a really good option um to electrify with with plasma burners. And of course there's a lot of different options to make that business case. There's been a lot of talk um around taxes. We put more taxes to electricity than to gas. So uh removing those those taxes from from electricity is going to help electrification. But beyond that also we need to look at the enabling technologies for each industrial process because electrification has to be more efficient. An electric vehicle is way more efficient than fossil fuel. That's why it works. Heat pump more efficient. We will need to look at those industrial processes and accelerate the efficiency so that electrification makes sense. And then also it's going to be a problem of access to electricity. So um like investing in the grid and um because if you're going to electrify transport industry and you're going to have the new demand for AI, there's going to be problems. We're seeing already into places where we really want to electrify. We're having problems to access the electricity. In order to scale electrification, um, we are going to need a big electrification agenda that really understands the sectors. So, we're going to have to take out taxes away from electricity because now you have more taxes in electricity that in gas. you're going to have to uh find uh a good electricity price for energy intensive uh industries in order for them to electrify. And then also we're going to have to accelerate and support the actual enablers, the technology that allows processes to electrify, which in many ways are is is European technology. In transport it might be batteries etc which will rely a lot on China today but in industrial electrification we have a lot of European technologies also the the grid needs to have uh you know investments which pretty much is a lot of European technologies as well Europe is not an energy rich region so we're going to have to electrify we're going to have to have circularity because the combination of that will reduce dependency for importing the 400 billion uh that we that we import on energy plus lots of uh imports as well on materials. So then we would rely on local uh resources.