The power industry spends a lot of time on the supply side. But some of the largest single point-sources of CO₂ on the planet aren't power stations at all — they're the steel mills, cement kilns, refineries and chemical complexes that sit on the demand side of the grid, often with their own captive generation. As heavy industry electrifies, these facilities move from being someone else's emissions problem to being a central feature of power planning.
Using open data from Climate TRACE (https://climatetrace.org/) (CC BY 4.0), we mapped capacity and CO₂e onto ~30,000 industrial facilities worldwide and ranked them. For a power audience, the scale is the headline.
A single steel plant can out-emit the dirtiest power station
The highest-emitting power plant in the world sits around 29 Mt CO₂e/year. POSCO's Gwangyang steel plant in South Korea emits roughly 34.8 Mt — more than any single power station on Earth. China's Angang Steel (~31 Mt) and Wuhan Iron & Steel (~25.9 Mt) aren't far behind.
The reason matters for the grid. A large share of steelmaking CO₂ is process emissions — carbon released from coke as a chemical reductant — not combustion. You can't fully fix it by greening the electricity supply. But the routes that do abate it (hydrogen-based direct reduction, scrap-fed electric arc furnaces) are deeply electricity-intensive. Every tonne of "green steel" is a new, large, firm load request landing on a transmission planner's desk.
The other heavyweights are also future loads
- Refineries: Reliance's Jamnagar (India) tops the list at ~18.9 Mt CO₂e/year, followed by Zhejiang Rongsheng (~9.9 Mt) and GS-Caltex Yeosu (~8.9 Mt).
- Chemicals: China's Golmud (Qarhan) complex (~19.6 Mt) leads — fertiliser and basic chemicals are quietly enormous emitters, and electrified crackers/heat are on the roadmap.
- Cement: more distributed, but the biggest single kilns — China's Jinfeng (~6.7 Mt), Nigeria's Obajana (~5.9 Mt) — still rank among the largest point sources.
Each of these is a candidate for electrification, CCS, or on-site clean generation — and each decision interacts with the grid the power sector runs.
Why a facility-by-facility view helps power planning
Sector totals ("cement is ~8% of emissions") are useful for policy and useless for action. What moves projects is knowing which facility, owned by whom, emitting how much, where — and what its electrification pathway implies for nearby capacity. Facility-level data unlocks:
- Load forecasting — pinpoint the industrial sites whose decarbonisation will add firm demand.
- Interconnection & siting — large emitters are large future power customers.
- Captive-generation visibility — many of these sites generate their own power today.
- Efficiency targeting — the biggest emitters are where the biggest thermal savings hide.
The honest caveat: these are modelled estimates from Climate TRACE, not audited stack data — directionally strong, not tonne-perfect.
Explore the data
Free, browsable directory — one page per facility (capacity, owner, location, CO₂), with rankings by sector, country and operator:
- Industrial facilities & rankings: https://inzonex.co.uk/industryatlas/
- Biggest emitters across all sectors: https://inzonex.co.uk/industryatlas/rankings/
Open data (CC BY 4.0), free to use and cite, correction link on every page.
Takeaway
The hard-to-abate sector is also the next big story in power demand. The facilities that dominate industrial CO₂ today are the same ones whose electrification will reshape load tomorrow — and they're a finite, nameable set. Making them visible, with the numbers attached, is how planning gets ahead of it.