Electrified Process Heating in Textile Wet-Processing Industry: A Techno-Economic Analysis for China, Japan, and Taiwan

The textile industry accounts for approximately 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There is a significant opportunity to decarbonize the textile industry by electrification of process heating where low- or zero-carbon electricity is used. Electrified process heating can be achieved through cross-cutting technologies without modifying the textile process equipment and/or through replacing the existing equipment with technologies that employ electromagnetic or resistance heating techniques for specific end-use applications. This paper aims to investigate the potential for electrification of process heating in the textile wet-processing industry in three of the top textile-producing and exporting regions in the world. To do this, two separate technology pathways, i.e., electrification through a) industrial heat pumps and b) textile end-use processes are developed and analyzed. The results show that the total potential final energy and CO2 savings due to electrification in both scenarios could be substantially large due to the lower energy intensity of the electrified heating systems. Moreover, the costs per unit of textile production are found to be lower in the case of industrial heat pumps compared to other systems. It is concluded that wide-scale electrification of process heating in the textile wet-processing industry will require major changes to the electricity system and individual sites, and the coordination efforts among different stakeholders to plan these changes must be intensified.