How to decarbonise an industrial plant without upfront capital

The problem is priority, not payback

A heat recovery scheme or a solar-and-storage installation often shows a payback well inside the horizon a board will accept. It still stalls, because industrial capital is scarce and competes against projects that grow revenue rather than reduce cost.

As long as the project needs CAPEX from the same pot as production investment, it is structurally second in line. Changing who provides the capital changes the decision.

Three structures that remove the CAPEX line

When a partner funds 100% of the agreed project CAPEX, the repayment has to come from somewhere. In practice there are three honest ways to arrange it.

• Supply agreement: you pay per unit of energy, heat or processed output actually delivered, at an agreed price over a term.
• Shared results: you pay a share of the measured saving against a baseline agreed in writing before any work starts.
• Joint company: investment and ownership are shared, with governance and milestones agreed in advance.

What determines the price you are offered

The number depends far less on the technology than on the load. A site running three shifts with a steady thermal demand supports a very different structure than one running a single shift with a seasonal peak.

Before any conversation about equipment, the data that matters is hourly electricity consumption over a full year, fuel consumption and process temperatures, the hours the plant actually runs, and the remaining life of the current thermal equipment.

The baseline is the part to negotiate carefully

In a shared-results structure, everything depends on what counts as the starting point. Production volume changes, energy prices move, and a cold year is not the same as a warm one. A baseline that is not normalised for those variables will be disputed in year two.

Agree in the contract how volume and price variations are treated, who measures, with what instruments, and what happens when the meter disagrees with the model.

What to check before signing

Four clauses decide whether the arrangement is comfortable for a decade: the term and what happens at the end, who owns the equipment during and after it, what a production stoppage does to your obligation, and how you exit if the plant is sold or the process changes.