UK government launches competition for efficiency solutions in energy intensive industries

THE UK government has launched a Contracts for Innovation competition that will fund projects to test resource efficiency solutions across three energy intensive sectors, including chemicals.

Opening the competition to applications this week, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and Innovate UK will allocate £3m (US$4m) to businesses that can demonstrate resource efficiency improvements in the chemicals, construction and automotive sectors. Project proposals must be entirely UK-based and should “contribute to UK territorial carbon savings”, the government says.

Each successful applicant will receive between £50,000 and £300,000 to run a project of up to five months, starting in November 2025. The government expects the average funding per project to be around £100,000. Projects must include a demonstration of the technology, either completed during the five-month period or within the last five years, and a life cycle assessment (LCA) that includes analysis of commercial potential. 

The government says applications should be framed in the context of DESNZ’s 2023 research on improving resource efficiency, which identified a number of commercially viable technologies across intensive manufacturing industries, including chemicals. The government has said chemicals applications in the competition should fall into at least one of five categories: industrial symbiosis, redesign of chemical formulations, carbon capture, replacement of fossil feedstocks with sustainable biomass, and replacement of fossil feedstocks through chemical plastic recycling or other valorisation routes.

Construction proposals must fall under at least one of several categories. While most are geared toward the sector’s civil industries, one focuses on recovering materials and components for reuse and recycling, and another targets reducing embodied carbon in new buildings, such as through lower-carbon cement and steel.

‘Missed opportunities’

The competition has been met with some disappointment for not having a wide enough scope.  David Gardner, chair of IChemE’s special interest group on sustainability, told TCE: “It is a shame that the call, although welcome, has missed the opportunity to be truly innovative in the approach and to address a more all-encompassing concept of resource efficiency that would help develop future, truly sustainable, processes.

“However, I would encourage chemical engineers to get involved with the competition, but to stretch themselves and the aims of any proposed project to go beyond the call itself and use their unique talents to demonstrate how resource efficiency can be incorporated into future production across all sectors.”

The government has said the LCA submitted at the end of each successful project must include analysis of downstream impacts, while instructing applicants that “if your solution relies on feedstocks that are utilised in other systems then we expect you to consider the impacts on these wider systems”. However, Gardner believes there is an over-reliance on LCAs as a metric of success. He said: “New developments in chemical engineering [are] moving beyond this type of analysis so that a much broader systems-thinking approach can be identified and adopted.

“By missing out these concepts, funded projects run the risk of solving a local problem rather than a global issue.” A DESNZ spokesperson said that “solutions which promote offshoring of UK industries will not be eligible”.

The competition is open to applications here and will close on 27 August 2025.