Research Projects

The Chemical and Materials Industry (CMI) is a critical yet high-emission sector, contributing 30% of global GHG emissions directly and ~70% when accounting for indirect supply chain impacts. In India, CMI drives industrial growth but faces sustainability challenges due to coal-dependent energy, inefficient processes, and lack of systemic decarbonization strategies. This proposal develops a first-of-its-kind computational framework to develop policies that transition India’s CMI toward net-zero emissions through three interlinked phases: (1) CMI Modeling – Adapting the open-source Aggregated CMI model (Sen et al., 2025) to India’s context, incorporating regional data on production, energy use, and material flows to map emission hotspots across sectors like fertilizers, petrochemicals, and steel; (2) AI-Driven Pathway Generation – Using small language models and superstructure optimization to synthesize transition roadmaps (e.g., green hydrogen adoption, circular feedstock systems, carbon capture retrofits), building on the PI’s prior work on LLM based pathway generation (Kumar et al., 2023); and (3) Multi-Objective Optimization – Evaluating pathways via trade-offs between emissions reduction, capital/operational costs, and socio-economic metrics using Pareto-front analysis.