The objective for this project was to work out the practical recommendations for the curb of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission at a regional level. This work was carried out in the following steps: a survey on GHG emission, the identification of the overall historical and current GHG emission rates as well as a breakdown into economical sectors, the forecast for future GHG emissions (up to 2020), identification of the technological opportunities for GHG emission reduction and an assessment of their potential reduction, identification of the main barriers for low-carbon development and the drafting of proposals and the instruments for GHG reduction. A draft for the low-carbon strategy was discussed with stakeholders and delivered to the government of Sverdlovsk Oblast.

This article discusses aspects of improving the efficiency of heating and heat-treatment furnaces from the standpoint of the fuel savings that can be realized by the use of different methods to modernize such furnaces.Keywords: greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, regenerative burner, thermal efficiency, monetary savings, automation.The Sverdlovskaya Oblast has three pipe plants and several metallurgical, mining, and machine-building concerns. To obtain finished pipes or rolled products, semifinished products have to be heated to a certain temperature in different types of heating furnaces. The factories also have heat-treatment furnaces to heat finished products in order to give them the necessary properties. The number of heating and heat-treatment furnaces in all of the factories combined totals several hundred.The main fuel used for these furnaces and units is natural gas. Complete combustion of the natural gas results in the formation of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) [1]where M G is the mass of the carbon dioxide that is formed in the combustion of all of the fuel, tons/ton product; 3.667 is a coefficient which determines the mass of the carbon dioxide formed per unit mass of burned carbon; C P is the mass content of carbon in the fuel, %; and M F is the mass of the burned natural gas, tons/ton product. The coefficient 3.667 was found from the equation that describes the complete oxidation of carbon. Thus, Eq. (1) includes the masses of the gases rather than their volumes. The natural gas obtained from different gas fields differs in composition, which accounts for the differences in the carbon content and specific density of the gas. To simplify the approximate calculations being performed here, we will assume that the natural gas consists of just methane. By mass, such a gas will contain 75% carbon and have a specific density of 0.717 g/liter. Making these assumptions allows us to use several simplified relations.