Identifying Promising Domains of Decarbonization Technologies: An Improved Methodology

Humanity has sought ways to decarbonize the economies and mitigate the effects of global warming. The scientific community has been producing intensive research on decarbonizing technologies and strategies. This article introduces an improved methodology, based on two available text-mining software, to identify the most relevant domains of decarbonizing technologies presented in scientific papers, research projects and patents. The improvements include the definition of an approach to obtain a final rank of the technologies’ domains and an enhanced procedure to create the semantic dictionary, a critical component for the bibliometric analysis. Moreover, a more robust and comprehensive search string was defined, reconciling the particularities of the used text-mining software. The methodology was applied to the 2011 to 2021 period. The results evidence the twenty better-ranked domains, where energy efficiency/management, hydrogen, generic renewable energy, carbon capture, energy storage and biofuel occupy the six first positions. Hydrogen, carbon capture and energy storage are the domains with a more accelerated increase in the scientific community’s relative interest. In contrast, energy efficiency and management, biofuel, and low-carbon transportation have lost relative interest. Moreover, results show that electrification, hydrogen, and geothermal energy domains significantly increase their relevance/occurrence from 2019 to 2021.