GPI President and CEO Rolf Nordstrom wrote “Not Your Grandparents’ Infrastructure: What Businesses Should Be Thinking About” for the Forbes Business Council website where it was originally published.
“Infrastructure” is like the tofu of buzzwords — it doesn’t express much by itself. Given the transformational infrastructure investments under consideration in the U.S., it’s worth thinking about what kinds of 21st-century infrastructure we need and what they would make possible for businesses and for society as a whole. I’ll wager it’s different than you think.
First off, what do we need to accomplish with our infrastructure investments? I’d like to humbly offer three goals:
- Ensure U.S. leadership with clean technologies, and enable a circular, net-zero carbon economy that protects and creates good-paying jobs.
- Make our infrastructure more integrated, resilient and able to deliver multiple benefits. This means not treating them — energy, water, transportation, IT, waste, etc. — as separate, stand-alone systems but as intertwined. We should capture synergies at moments when the capital stock is turning over.
- Serve the needs of the whole country, urban and rural, in an equitable way.
Allow me to offer some examples of what meeting these goals would mean in practice for businesses.
Energy
Our energy infrastructure is becoming more intertwined (think electrification of transport and buildings) and is poised for fundamental transformation. The speed of this evolution will hinge on what infrastructure investments we make now. This includes the following areas:
- Clean energy and energy efficiency retrofits for buildings should further electrify them where it makes sense and reduce operating costs.
- Investments in transmission (including a macro grid) alongside microgrids, energy storage and grid resilience can help avoid Texas-like events in the future.
- Smart grid technologies should automate the multidirectional flow of both electricity and data — something the electric grid was not originally designed to do — enabling a grid that is better able to respond to changes in supply and demand more efficiently and at a lower cost.
- The development of hydrogen infrastructure, including pipelines, storage, processing and fueling, can serve industry, transportation, buildings, power generation, energy storage and agriculture.
Transportation
Given the market momentum toward electrifying transportation, we will need a charging infrastructure to make that possible. As is often the case with major technological shifts, there is a chicken-and-egg problem. Which comes first, the electric vehicle or the charging station? Getting around this will require public-private partnership since early charging stations often lack a business case. This is particularly true for sufficient public charging stations in diverse communities and rural areas that often see a lack of investment.
The infrastructure play in transportation could also include using existing rail and highway rights-of-way to deploy high-capacity transmission lines and 5G broadband. Such an approach could enable three important national goals and help us keep up with other countries: clean, reliable and affordable electricity; providing charging stations to medium- and heavy-duty vehicles; and closing the urban/rural digital divide by making access to broadband affordable, equitable and universal.
Agriculture
We don’t typically think about agriculture when someone says “infrastructure,” but there is an opportunity to harness and build upon the existing infrastructure for ammonia to enable a zero-emission hydrogen economy. Both hydrogen and ammonia can be used separately and in tandem to store large quantities of renewable energy for use when it’s neither windy nor sunny. Green ammonia can also be a zero-carbon fuel and (paradoxically) a way to store and transport hydrogen more cheaply than moving it as hydrogen.
We would also do well to think about this nation’s working lands, both in agriculture and forestry, as part of our natural infrastructure. While we already invest federal resources in making farming less risky, there could be high returns on investing more in understanding the role working lands can play in feeding the world, improving water quality, improving wildlife habitat and storing carbon such as in building products.
Carbon Management
Achieving a net-zero emissions economy will require capturing and managing carbon dioxide (CO2) economywide and either storing that CO2 permanently underground or putting it to productive use in a circular carbon economy. This means we need to build an interconnected CO2 transport and storage infrastructure, essentially the “interstate highway system” for moving CO2 from where it is produced to where it is stored or used.
A recent jobs and economic analysis conducted by the Rhodium Group (commissioned by my company) shows that by enabling domestic industries to capture and manage their carbon emissions, a new CO2 transport and storage infrastructure can help safeguard current high-paying jobs, create new jobs and generate billions in capital investments. That same analysis shows that a robust CO2 transport network could unleash significant near-term opportunities as well.
Incorporating Sustainable Infrastructure
An approach to infrastructure that is both broader and more integrated could yield large benefits for businesses as the competitive pressures grow for sustainability. So how do you get started? Here are some initial steps toward identifying the opportunities in your business, some of which you may already have taken:
- Systematically map out the key types of infrastructure your company relies on, including those all along your supply chain.
- Are there opportunities to close resource loops in energy, water or materials (e.g., capturing carbon dioxide/monoxide for carbon recycling, capturing and manage water on-site, using zero-emission transport options, providing your wastes to another company as an input, etc.)?
- Are there opportunities to design out negative impacts of your business that cause damage to human health, natural systems or represent an inefficiency (e.g., greenhouse gases and hazardous substance releases, air, land and water pollution, wasted labor, etc.)?
- Are there opportunities to preserve value in the form of energy, labor and materials? In other words, can you design for durability, remanufacturing and recycling to keep products and materials circulating?
There has never been a bigger or more urgent opportunity for businesses to help reimagine the major infrastructure systems that make life possible — energy, water, materials, communications, food and transport — so that they become the foundation for lasting progress.