The World's Secret Electricity Superusers Revealed
31 octobre 2025 à 18:01
					An anonymous reader shares a report: The rush to secure electricity has intensified as tech companies look to spend trillions of dollars building data centers. There's an industry that consumes even more power than many tech giants, and it has largely escaped the same scrutiny: suppliers of industrial gases. 
Everyday items like toothpaste and life-saving treatments like MRIs are among the countless parts of modern life that hinge on access to gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and helium. Producing and transporting these gases to industrial facilities and hospitals is a highly energy-intensive process. Three companies -- Linde, Air Liquide and Air Products and Chemicals -- control 70% of the $120 billion global market for industrial gases. Their initiatives to rein in electricity use or switch to renewables aren't enough to rapidly cut carbon emissions, according to a new report from the campaign group Action Speaks Louder. 
"The scale of the sector's greenhouse gas emissions and electricity use is staggering," said George Harding-Rolls, the group's head of campaigns and one of the authors of the report. Linde's electricity use in 2024 exceeded that of Alphabet's Google and Samsung Electronics as well as oil giant TotalEnergies, while the power use of Air Liquide and Air Products was comparable to that of Shell and Microsoft. Yet unlike fossil fuel and tech companies, these industrial gas companies are far from household names because their customers are the world's largest chemicals, steel and oil companies rather than average consumers. 
The industry relies on air-separation units, which use giant compressors to turn air into liquid and then distill it into its many components. These machines are responsible for much of the industry's electricity demand, and their use alone is responsible for 2% of carbon dioxide emissions in China and the US, the world's two largest polluters.
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