Looking back on 2024, the second year of the INDABA Partnership

The year 2024 was an exciting one for the Industrial Decarbonization Analysis, Benchmarking, and Action (INDABA) Partnership, a research partnership focused on innovation in efficient, lower emitting industrial processes involving five universities in four countries and over 20 multi-sector, multi-stakeholder partners. Here is just a snapshot of some of our accomplishments:

The team published several papers:

• Sievert, K. Song, Y., Chen, Y. and Karplus, V.J. (2024). Expanding renewable electricity use in global corporate supply chains. Environmental Research: Energy, 1(3), 033001.

• Peng, H., Qu, C., Karplus, V.J., Zhang, D. (2025). The C-REM 4.0 model: A CGE model for provincial analysis of China’s carbon neutrality target. Energy and Climate Management, 1(1), 9400006.

• Karplus, V.J., Iacob, I., Moore, E.J. Morgan, G.M. (2024). Risks in the design of regional hydrogen hub systems: A review and commentary. Risk Analysis, 17449.

• Zhuo, Q.; Al-Harbi, M.N.; Pistorius, P.C. (2025). Feature Engineering to Embed Process Knowledge: Analyzing the Energy Efficiency of Electric Arc Furnace Steelmaking. Metals 15(13) (in press).

  
  

In July, the INDABA Partnership convened in Beijing for a conference and study tour focused on frontiers in ironmaking decarbonization. Click here to read more about this exciting conference and its outcomes.

The team also met quarterly online to exchange research insights, with presentations on prospects for hydrogen ironmaking in the United States, prospects for low carbon iron and steelmaking in South Africa, observations from the conference and plant tour in China, and carbon capture and sequestration for integrated plants in the United States.

The project team held two summer programs for high school students, one led by INDABA Project faculty (Master Class for CMU's Summer Academy for Math and Science) and one led by Ph.D. students in the INDABA Project and/or part of the Engineering and Public Policy Department at CMU (SUCCEED).

Karplus and Pistorius co-taught a project-based course, 19-664 Advancing Low Carbon Transition in Industry, with involvement from project partner U. S. Steel Corporation. 

The team developed a public release version (2.0) of our technoeconomic assessment tool, the decarbSTEEL (Decarbonizing Steelmaking TechnoEconomic EvaLuation) tool.

Two CMU Ph.D. students (Katherine Jordan and Elina Hoffmann) – supported during the later phases of their studies by the INDABA Partnership – completed their dissertations and graduated from the Engineering and Public Policy Ph.D. program at CMU.

We look forward to an exciting year ahead and to sharing our progress with you along the way!