Mapping and discussing Industrial Waste Heat (IWH) potentials for different countries

In accordance to the current worldwide trend of reducing CO2 emissions and to make the industry more competitive incrementing its efficiency, some countries are starting to quantify their quantity of Industrial Waste Heat. In fact, to be able to recover and reuse this waste heat from industrial processes as a source for other processes or activities, the availability of reliable data of the Industrial Waste Heat potential found in a region is a key point. For that, after an exhaustive literature research, this article shows Industrial Waste Heat data from 33 countries and 6 subregions of different countries. Their feasibility is assessed in the discussion part as it is expected and shown in most of the cases that the amount of Industrial Waste Heat is proportional to some parameters regarding the country and its industry like: the Energy Consumed by the Country, the Energy Consumed by the Industry and the amount of Industrial Waste Heat Intensive Industry in the country. Country scale has been chosen and it is shown that at other scales these parameters are not always available. Nevertheless, some of the studied cases found show data not fitting into this pattern (approximately 1/6 of the data found). That can be explained taking into account that in most of the studies the methodology to account the quantity of Industrial Waste Heat is not explained. Factors like the reference year of the data, the boundaries of the analysis, the type of waste heat considered, etc. affect to the report of quantity of Industrial Waste Heat. Therefore, the authors provide a set of parameters and recommend checking these in order to confirm the reliability of data referring to Industrial Waste Heat quantities.