A comparison study of EU and Japan methods to assess CO2 emission reduction and energy saving in the iron and steel industry

Information on energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the iron and steel industry may become important to the assessment of energy saving and the design of emissions trading schemes. This paper focuses monitoring aspects, used two methods to calculate CO2 emission, the European Union Emission Trading Scheme and a method developed by the Japanese Iron and Steel Federation, to investigate the effect of the accounting method on the assessment of energy saving by four model steel mills with different levels of energy efficiency. Depending on the calculation method used, the calculated energy savings and calculated CO2 emissions for a given mill were found to differ from 5% to 15% and 4% to 14% respectively, simply by using different calculation methods. Methodologies that evaluate only CO2 emission and track emissions by process may not fully account for energy saving efforts such as using waste heat, generating power using byproduct gases, and energy management efforts applied over the whole mill rather than on a single process. Points of concern in the iron and steel industry are identified in the areas of calculating energy saving, determining CO2 emissions, and setting benchmarks.