Addressing Climate Change - A Novel Greenhouse Gas Carbon Abatement Process (G-CAP?) for the Iron and Steel Industry

摘要

To address climate change the steel industry is increasingly focusing on the reduction of energy consumption as well as Green-House Gas (GHG) emissions. Legislators around the world are also responding to climate change by limiting energy consumption and placing a price on CO_2 emissions. Top-down economic modeling has been employed as a primary tool to assess and establish the expected economic impacts of enacting energy reduction legislation or pricing CO_2. This methodology is appropriate for sectors such as electrical power generation, where international trade is limited, the supply chain is simple and production processes are largely standard. On the other hand, in the case of Energy Intense Trade Exposed Industry (EITEI) sectors such as the Iron and Steel industry, this economic modeling methodology does not adequately define the impacts of CO_2 pricing. To overcome this limitation, a novel GHG Carbon Abatement Process (G-CAP?) that incorporates a sound technical element to the assessment of GHG reduction opportunities, was designed. In contrast to traditional economic modeling, the methodology is bottom-up, and is applied in much more detail to the specific operations of the iron and steel industry. The G-CAP? process has been applied to generate Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACC) at three steel plants namely, New Zealand Steel, BlueScope Steel and OneSteel. In addition, the MACC concepts are currently being applied to review the energy consumption and GHG emissions for setting future targets, by the APP (Asia Pacific Partnership) countries, which includes USA and Canada. This paper describes the G-CAP? process that was developed with the main objective of quantifying and qualifying the potential energy savings and CO_2 abatement within the iron and steel industry.