Offering the fifth version of the list of technologies to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050

The Deloitte Tohmatsu Group's science and technology initiative, Deloitte Tohmatsu Science and Technology has attempted to organize technologies that contribute to carbon neutrality by perspectives such as the potential for reducing CO2 emissions, cost for reducing CO2 emissions, and technology readiness, and to prepare a list comparing these factors (hereinafter referred to as the "list of technologies"). In the list of technologies of this report, we feature the fifth prototype of the list of technologies.

In the first three versions, we started developing the research methodology, and added the research items and analysis cases while expanding the number of the technologies listed. In the fourth version, we applied a text mining (information extraction) algorithm to the news article data for the purpose of a simple evaluation of the direction of investment and development and compiled the results of calculating the number of articles related to each technology as the relative degree of attention to each technology. In addition, we set search keywords (queries) that characterize each technology, extracted articles highly related to the key words, using the text mining method, and visualized the degree of attention paid to each technology in Japan and foreign countries.

In this report, which is the fifth version, the number of listed technologies has been expanded to 63, and the technological fields have also been expanded, focusing on agriculture and heat utilization of renewable energy.
In addition, to improve the objectivity of the list, the opinions of external experts, mainly university researchers, were reflected for some of the technologies to refine the values in the technology assessment. Moreover, the latest trends and findings in research cases were reflected in the list as progress in decarbonization costs and technology readiness level (TRL).

In the future, we plan to expand the list by sequentially adding promising technologies, conduct a close examination and periodic review of the data as well as further expansion of external expert reviews of each technology, deduct interactions and double-counting among technologies by considering integrated models for each technology, and link the list to each technology player. We hope that this report will be helpful in the planning of social implementation strategies for technologies aimed at achieving carbon neutrality in Japan, as well as helping companies and local governments consider what to include in their approaches.

Authors: Kotaro Saito, Naoki Sakaguchi, Takashi Sugiyama, Junichi Ominami, Akihiro Urata, Ken Mohri, Hisanaga Oba, Takashi Yamamoto, Hao Zhao, Yoshiki Akimoto, Kohei Akashi, Shohei Takata, Kazuki Tomonari, Zhe Wang, Nao Sekiguchi, Tomoya Sakunai, and Hiroki Toyoda