Industrial decarbonisation is often conceptualized through solutions that promise deep emissions reductions, such as green hydrogen and carbon capture. These pathways are critical, especially for sectors that are difficult to reduce but are still years away from widespread adoption.
Industry accounted for nearly half of India’s final energy consumption in 2025, with much of it still tied to fossil fuels. The story is even sharper when we look at process heat. The demand for low-temperature heat and steam (less than 250 degrees C) forms the backbone for various processes across sectors such as textiles, food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paper and pulp. This process demand for heat and steam is largely thermal and is met by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
The issue becomes critical on two levels. First, deepening geopolitical uncertainty and volatile domestic supply chains are worsening the availability of these fuels. Second, a significant portion of these manufacturing emissions reside in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which are largely concentrated in sectors such as textiles, food processing and paper. These are sectors where coal, firewood, biomass, gas and heating oil continue to operate conventional heat systems such as boilers, thermofluid heaters, dryers, evaporators and hot water systems, etc.
This is why industrial heat decarbonisation is not only a climate issue, but also a socio-economic privilege, further intertwined with other co-benefits such as air quality, cost competitiveness, energy security and worker well-being.
Heat pumps as a solution
Heat pumps enter this conversation as one of the most practical, scalable and modular technologies for this specific frontier of industrial heat. Unlike boilers, heat pumps do not generate heat by burning fuel. They move and adjust heat from one pair to another using electricity. This is why they can deliver more useful heat than the electricity they consume.
Industrial heat pumps often have a coefficient of performance of 3 to 5, meaning they can provide three to five units of heat for every unit of electricity used. Even at higher output temperatures, where output drops, they can remain more efficient than simple electric resistance heating. This efficiency is at the heart of their decarbonisation value. It reduces the amount of electricity needed to electrify heat and improves the economy of the transition from combustion. If renewable electricity is available at competitive prices, the effective cost of heat from a heat pump becomes attractive even compared to conventional fuels as of today.
What makes this transition complex is the way industrial heat is currently produced and used. In a typical medium-sized textile finishing unit studied in Surat, around 92% of the energy load was thermal, supplied by steam and industrial heat using a mixture of Indonesian coal and lignite. The unit consumed roughly 0.42 kg of Indonesian coal per meter of fabric processed, illustrating the material intensity of using the fuel in routine operations. Despite this, steam is often used indirectly to produce hot water, maintain vessel temperature, or heat surfaces rather than directly heating the product.
This reflects central inefficiency. Conventional industrial heat systems in such factories are often designed to meet the highest heat requirements, with boilers sized to meet peak demand. But many loads require lower quality heat. In such cases, steam is generated at a higher temperature and pressure, then reduced or vented for lower temperature applications. However, industrial heat pumps follow a different technical approach: start with the lowest temperature heat demand and then increase the heat only where it is needed. This reverses the older boiler approach and can reduce overall energy consumption by 40-60% in suitable applications.
This right-sizing logic is particularly relevant in MSME brownfield clusters. Many boilers are old, oversized, manually operated in this setting and run below optimum. It is often not practical to replace each boiler with one large electrical system. But heat pumps can be modular. First of all, they can serve specific loads: preheating boiler feed water, hot water supply, support of dyeing and washing processes, recovery of waste heat from waste water or reduction of the need for steam in evaporators and drying streams.
Their role becomes even more fruitful when heating and cooling are considered together. Industrial heat pumps can simultaneously produce hot water, steam or hot air and produce cooling or dehumidified air as a by-product. In food processing and digital textile printing, where process heat is required along with controlled cooling for process stability and equipment performance, heat pumps can simultaneously provide useful heat while reducing the load on the chiller or air conditioner.
Health, Safety, Emissions Control
In addition to system efficiency, heat pumps can also improve worker health and safety. Heat exposure in the workplace is emerging as a serious occupational health risk, especially in labor-intensive factory environments where internal process heat compounds occur that increase the ambient temperature. Globally, more than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat at work, with the highest exposure rates in Asia and the Pacific. Prolonged heat in the workplace is associated with heat exhaustion, heart stroke, cardiovascular stress, kidney disease, accident risk and reduced cognitive performance.
In parallel, process heat from combustion contributes to emissions of harmful air pollutants that exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular health risks. The public health dimension is significant: air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for an estimated 1.72 million premature deaths in India in 2022, with industrial heat systems as the main source of these emissions. In this context, increased use of electrified heating systems such as industrial heat pump technologies, especially in the temperature ranges in which they are technically feasible, can significantly improve air quality, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and reduce health damage related to air pollution and climate change. By displacing on-site combustion and enabling the integration of heating and cooling, heat pumps can create opportunities for spot and space cooling to improve thermal comfort in production halls.
So what emerges is not only a technological shift, but also a systemic transition. The scaling of industrial heat pumps will depend on how well they are built into existing industrial ecosystems through better process integration, reliable access to cheap electricity and financing models that work for industries, especially SMEs. Done right, it can unlock not only emissions reductions, but also a more resilient, efficient and secure industrial growth model.
Vrinda Gupta is Associate Director of Vasudha Foundation and Srinivas Ethiraj is Deputy Manager of Vasudha Foundation.
Published – 06 May 2026 14:40 IST
