Energy demand for materials in an international context

Abstract

Materials are everywhere and have determined society. The rapid increase in consumption of materials has led to an increase in the use of energy and release of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reducing emissions in material-producing industries is a key challenge. If all of industry switched to current best practices, the energy-efficiency improvement potential would be between 20% and 35% for most sectors. While these are considerable potentials, especially for sectors that have historically paid a lot of attention to energy-efficiency improvement, realization of these potentials under current 'business as usual' conditions is slow due to a large variety of barriers and limited efforts by industry and governments around the world. Importantly, the potentials are not sufficient to achieve the deep reductions in carbon emissions that will be necessary to stay within the climate boundaries as agreed in the 2015 Paris Conference of Parties. Other opportunities need to be included in the menu of options to mitigate GHG emissions. It is essential to develop integrated policies combining energy efficiency, renewable energy material efficiency and material demand reduction, offering the most economically attractive way to realize deep reductions in carbon emissions.This article is part of the themed issue 'Material demand reduction'.

Assessment of Sectoral Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Potentials for 2030

“…The emission reduction means an additional reduction of the energy intensity of nearly 30% compared to the current policy scenario (estimated to be 40% compared to 2015 frozen efficiency levels). This is compatible with the estimate by Worrell and Carreon [79] (see also Reference [80]), who estimated a static potential of 27 ± 9%. Note that the potentials vary by sector and by region.…”

“…Note that the potentials vary by sector and by region. For example, Worrell and Carreon estimate them to be 9 to 30%for iron and steel, 4 to 7% for primary aluminium, 20 to 25% for cement, 23 to 27% for petrochemicals, and 11 to 25% for ammonia production [79]. Based on the share in current policy emissions, 2.2 GtCO 2 emission reduction is allocated to direct emissions and 1.9 GtCO 2 is allocated to indirect emissions.…”

Integrated assessment of resource-energy-environment nexus in China's iron and steel industry

“…Specifically, resource-energy-environment nexus of China's iron and steel industry, in this study, aims estimate decline trade-offs, improve synergies of resource, energy, water, and emissions of GHGs and air pollutants, improve energy and resource or material efficiency, and guide development of new decision-and policy-making. To integrate industrial sub-sectors into system model (e.g., IAMs) and assess the associated potential solutions for climate mitigation, we firstly integrate iron and steel industry into the MESSAGEix model, because of its large contribution to CO 2 emissions (29% of industrial direct emissions) and pollution, and its high level of resource and energy demand (20% of industrial energy use) (Worrell and Carreon, 2017). This approach takes the advantages of the model's high level of detail technology to estimate the energy & resource saving…”

Radical dematerialization and degrowth

“…Nation states committed in Paris to significant reductions in carbon emissions. Reducing carbon emissions requires reducing material use [1]. This dematerialization is 'radical', first because of its unprecedented scale, and second, because of the significant social, cultural and political changes it will entail [2].…”