Heating represents half of humankind’s energy usage, and it is the single largest contributor to global carbon emissions, accounting for roughly 40% of all anthropogenic CO2. Much of that heat is delivered by processes that directly convert energy with high work potential into low temperature heat, resulting in irreversible losses of work potential. Reversible processes that more fully utilize the available work potential could deliver far larger streams of heat by using that work potential to facilitate extraction of heat from the environment. In this paper, fundamental thermodynamics is used to show that this wasted work is responsible for a majority share of the energy requirements and carbon emissions of fuel-burning for heat and is, by extension, among the single largest drivers of climate change. It is further shown, using established process simulation tools and verified by numerical calculations, that this wasted work can be avoided through practical process intensification using only existing equipment. We show example processes, simulated in ASPEN PLUS, using chemical fuels as a feedstock and which deliver quantities of usable heat roughly triple that which would be obtained by direct combustion. Processes of this sort, if further optimized and widely applied, could significantly alleviate global CO2 emissions and climate change.
