In February 2025, Bezos Earth Fund, Mission Possible Partnership, and RMI came together in Houston to celebrate the progress of their clean industrial hubs project, a joint plan conceived in 2022 to tackle one of the world’s greatest sustainability challenges: decarbonizing the heavy industry and transport sectors.

The industries, which include aluminum, cement, chemicals, steel, aviation, shipping, and trucking, generate nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and due to their energy-dense processes are often difficult to electrify. Adding to this challenge, large capital projects, like those needed to retrofit existing industrial facilities for clean energy or build new ones, are expensive to build, and the availability of clean energy to power operations varies drastically by region.

The model to address this funding and logistics challenge: clean industrial hubs. RMI and Mission Possible Partnership experts sought to bring together interconnected industrial assets and infrastructure with policymakers, financial institutions, and community organizations to show that a regional-based approach could de-risk and accelerate projects for developers and investors and increase community support. After assessing options nationwide, Houston, Texas, was chosen as a focus region for its existing industrial base, high number of commercial-scale, low-emissions energy projects, highly skilled workforce, and market-driven mentality.

Faustine Delasalle of Mission Possible Partnership and Bryan Fisher of RMI, who pioneered the clean industrial hubs concept, with Lucy Kessler of Bezos Earth Fund.

What makes this project so unique is the synergistic ecosystem that Mission Possible Partnership and RMI have built. By integrating subnational policy, finance, infrastructure, and community engagement, they have helped Houston become a leader in the green industrial economy. This collaborative, place-based approach is exactly what’s needed to tackle the challenge of decarbonizing these carbon-intensive industries.

A legacy of energy leadership

Texas, and Houston in particular, has a long legacy of energy leadership. The first oil-producing well was drilled in 1866, and the subsequent oil boom led to rapid economic and population growth in the state. By the 1940s, Texas was leading US oil production, and Houston was one of the nation’s largest cities.

Today, the state produces 25 percent of US domestic energy and is responsible for 25 percent of the country’s publicly traded oil and gas exploration and production, 15 percent of the nation’s total refining capacity, and 44 percent of the nation’s base petrochemical manufacturing capacity.

While traditionally an oil and gas powerhouse, the “everything is bigger in Texas” maxim holds true for renewable energy in the Lonestar state as well. Texas has led the nation in wind production for 17 years — exceeding 40,000 megawatts of wind power in 2022 — and, at the end of 2024, surpassed California as the top utility-scale solar producer in the United States. Texas is also forecasted to produce 50 percent of US clean hydrogen by 2050 — a critical energy source and feedstock for steel, chemicals, and more.

Jon Creyts and Bryan Fisher of RMI are joined by board member Jessica Uhl on a visit to a hydrogen production facility in Houston in 2023.

This abundance of clean energy is essential for industrial decarbonization projects — which rely on wind, solar, and hydrogen to power their net-zero operations — but Houston’s leadership in industry and technology sets them further apart. In 2022, HyVelocity, an industry-led collaborative focused on long-lasting, domestic energy production in the US Gulf Coast was formed to explore the feasibility of a hydrogen hub in the Houston region. RMI and Mission Possible Partnership worked closely with HyVelocity, who ultimately became a recipient of one of the Department of Energy’s hydrogen hub awards.

The same year, Greater Houston Partnership launched the Houston Energy Transition Initiative (HETI) to accelerate investment in energy projects driving regional economic development and employment opportunities while reducing the environmental impact of Houston’s growth. HETI became an invaluable partner to RMI and Mission Possible Partnership, working closely together to produce two reports, Charging up the Energy Transition in Houston: Exploring Future Electricity Demand and Capturing the Benefits of Industrial Decarbonization for Houston and Beyond. They also helped identify companies from their growing membership willing to take bold action by collaborating on clean industrial hub projects.

Growing Texas’ low-emissions industrial ecosystem

Heavy industry and transport in Texas, including cement, steel, aluminum, chemicals, aviation, shipping, and heavy-duty trucking, account for 23 percent of US industrial greenhouse gas emissions. RMI and Mission Possible Partnership’s work in the Texas Gulf Coast focused on driving down costs and emissions across three critical areas: hydrogen, carbon, and electrification. These sources serve both as a low-emissions feedstock and energy for transport and chemical sectors, as well as cement and steel production. Modernizing these industries has major upsides for the economy and the environment, creating jobs, unlocking new technologies, future-proofing Houston’s industrial ecosystem, and improving air quality.

We took a two-pronged approach, providing (1) targeted support to specific projects to improve success and accelerate to construction phase, and (2) ecosystem-level support through state/local policy, finance, and community engagement across the Texas Gulf Coast.

RMI and Mission Possible Partnership experts focused on providing targeted advisory to the developers of eight commercial-scale projects across aviation, cement, shipping, and hydrogen sectors. Six projects reached Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) stage — a detailed planning stage of a project where the technical scope, design parameters, and cost estimations are thoroughly defined — and a further two reached Final Investment Decision (FID) — a key point in a project’s development when the decision is made to proceed with the project.

The hubs ecosystem work focused on articulating the common policy, finance, and community goals needed for the region to successfully decarbonize. The workstreams within this approach included regional considerations of the enormous electrification requirements of the region, potential capital stacking for public and private dollars, and upskilling project developers and community organizations to enable effective dialogues to reach consensus and enable project development.

If successful, the specific projects we supported will need to mobilize roughly $25 billion in spending on long-term assets through 2030 and have potential to capture over $10 billion in public funding from grants and incentives, should they remain available. Finally, these projects have the potential to reduce or avoid carbon emissions by 13 million tons per year in 2030, and 340 million tons cumulatively by 2050.

During the February convening, project developers shared how support from RMI and Mission Possible Partnership helped them accelerate their projects and explore new low-emissions technologies.

Chris Shugart of Ambient Fuels shares thoughts during a panel discussion at the February 2025 Houston convening.

We did an engagement with RMI and Mission Possible Partnership that was really helpful. Instead of our prior path of producing hydrogen for local consumption, we looked at creating hydrogen derivatives, such as sustainable aviation fuels at our Corpus Christi project specifically, and it really helped turn the corner for us where today I would say probably about half of what we’re doing in our business is going downstream into derivative fuels. The partnership has become very important and we’re now up the curve on all the skillsets needed to put those projects together.

Texas Gulf Coast power and infrastructure

Access to reliable, renewable energy is critical to a successful clean industrial hub. Calculated growth in electricity demand (MW) and consumption (MWh) for the Greater Houston Area is expected to nearly triple by 2050. Some potential key drivers of increased electricity consumption are hydrogen production and electrification of high-temperature industrial heat, Houston’s growing population, and new and emerging technology deployments across the region.

RMI and Mission Possible Partnership’s work highlights the need for coordinated planning to build out the electrical infrastructure necessary to support industrial decarbonization. Stakeholders — including energy users, utilities, policymakers and regulators, and communities — need to proactively collaborate on grid expansion and power infrastructure for Houston, and all of Texas, to leverage electricity in the energy transition, and maintain the state’s position as an energy export leader.

At the February gathering, optimism remained high in Texas’s ability to maintain its leadership in renewable energy production. Since 2013, Texas has had an 11 percent reduction in carbon intensity of power generation across the state as net power generation increased 26 percent. Additionally, Texas has a successful record of Scope 2 emissions reductions through electrical generation fuel switching, with coal and natural gas dropping from 86 percent of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ (ERCOT’s) electric generation profile in 2001 to 62 percent in 2023. Texas’ leadership in wind, solar, and hydrogen production would not be possible if Texas had not been a giant in adopting each wave of energy innovation over the past few decades, capitalizing on the economic and environmental benefits of progress.

Faustine Delasalle catches up with Brett Perlman of the Center for Houston’s Future.

It has been a pleasure to have collaborated with such tremendous people and partners on these pioneering projects. Working at the level of an “industrial hub” like in the Houston area matters because the local business community can develop a shared vision of the benefits of the transition for the region, engage with policymakers on how to improve project bankability with a single voice, map out energy infrastructure needs for both electricity and molecules, and nurture corporate partnerships.

Forging a clean energy future

Houston’s booming local clean tech innovation ecosystem and billions of dollars in investments in low-emissions industrial facilities is helping create a bright future for local communities. In just four quarters (3Q23–3Q24), Texas has led the nation with a $26.6 billion energy and industry investment, and an additional $2.2 billion energy transition manufacturing investment. Decarbonization efforts in the region are projected to drive significant economic growth, potentially creating over 530,000 new jobs between now and 2050 in the 10-county region surrounding Houston as the region moves toward a lower emissions future.

These jobs will help power a resilient regional economy and create opportunities for domestic leadership in emerging technologies. Communities also stand to benefit from reduced air pollution, seeing improved health outcomes in the near term, and less extreme climate impacts in the long term.

The clock is ticking. Meeting global climate goals requires a rapid scale-up of clean industrial projects — more than 700 net-zero projects need to be operational by 2030 to meet global climate goals. Most of these projects will occur in regional industrial hubs, like Houston, where the industrial and social infrastructure is in place to support ambitious capital projects. That’s because the hubs concept has proven successful, with industrial projects in Houston reaching FID at a much higher rate than the global average; the rate is even higher for companies engaged with RMI and Mission Possible Partnership.

“While the work is localized, its impact is far-reaching,” explains Lucy Kessler, senior program officer of Sustainable Finance at the Bezos Earth Fund. “What is happening in Houston is part of a broader network of clean industrial hubs, and we at the Earth Fund are excited to collaborate with the MPP and RMI teams to help disseminate this knowledge and ensure that other hubs can benefit from the unique, place-based approach.”

Building a new energy economy to support heavy industry and transport sectors is both an enormous opportunity and a monumental challenge. In Houston, industry, finance, and community are coming together to provide a solution.