Search

The steelmaking industry is responsible for 7% of global CO2 emissions, making decarbonization a significant challenge. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of current steel-production processes, assessing their environmental impact in terms of CO2 emissions at a global level. Limitations of the current pathways are outlined by using objective criteria and a detailed review of the relevant literature. Decarbonization strategies are rigorously evaluated across various scenarios, emphasizing technology feasibility. Focusing on three pivotal areas—scrap utilization, hydrogen integration, and electricity consumption—in-depth assessments are provided, backed by notable contributions from both industrial and scientific fields. The intricate interplay of technical, economic, and regulatory considerations substantially affects CO2 emissions, particularly considering the EU Emissions Trading System. Leading steel producers have established challenging targets for achieving carbon neutrality, requiring a thorough evaluation of industry practices. This paper emphasizes tactics to be employed within short-, medium-, and long-term periods. This article explores two distinct case studies: One involves a hot rolling mill that utilizes advanced energy techniques and uses H2 for the reheating furnace, resulting in a reduction of 229 kt CO2-eq per year. The second case examines DRI production incorporating H2 and achieves over 90% CO2 reduction per ton of DRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate anomalies are affecting the world. How to reduce carbon emissions has become an important issue for governments and academics. Although previous researchers have discussed the factors of carbon emission reduction from environmental regulation, economic development, and industrial structure, limited studies have explored the carbon emission reduction effect of a city's spatial structure. Based on 108 Chinese cities from the Yangtze River Economic Belt between 2003 and 2017, this paper examines the impact of the city cluster policy on city carbon emissions using the difference-in-differences (DID) method. We find that: (1) The city cluster policy has significantly reduced the cities' carbon emissions by 7.4%. Furthermore, after a series of robust and endogenous tests, such as parallel trend and PSM-DID, the core conclusion still remains. (2) We further identify possible economic channels through this effect, and find that city cluster policy would increase city productivity, city technological innovation, and industrial structure optimization. The conclusions of this paper have important practical significance for China to achieve carbon neutrality and facilitate future deep decarbonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Republic of Korea has unique geographical characteristics similar to those of an island, resulting in an isolated power system. For this reason, securing sufficient operating reserves for the system's stability and reliability in the face of the intermittency of increasing variable renewable energy (VRE) is paramount, and this will pave the way to achieving the nation's decarbonization target and carbon neutrality. However, the current reserve-operation method in Republic of Korea does not take into account energy-system conditions, such as the intermittency of the VRE. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of the impact of changes in reserve-operation methods on the electricity market in the future Republic of Korean power system, with the increased levels of VRE that are currently envisioned. Specifically, three reserve-operation methods, including Korea's current reserve-power-operation standards, were applied to the two power-system plans announced by the Korean government to analyze the annual generator operation and costs. The analysis results show that securing reserves proportional to the VRE would exert negative effects, such as increased power-generation costs and the curtailment of nuclear and VRE generation. These results can contribute to the estimation of operational reserves needed for high levels of VRE and to the design of new the Korean reserve market, to be introduced in 2025. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses existing trends and prospects for decarbonization in the Commonwealth of Independent States (the CIS), an international organization that regroups Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The CIS occupies a significant share of Eurasia, representing a large share of global energy consumption and production with a corresponding carbon footprint. These countries and their decarbonization prospects are rarely discussed in the English-language scientific literature. This paper fills in this gap by offering a comprehensive analysis based on statistical data, policy documents, and scenario-based future projections. The results underline that revisiting Nationally Determined Contributions, increasing energy efficiency, and decoupling GDP growth from greenhouse gas emissions are essential to the implementation of the Paris Agreement. The future energy mix should include larger shares of renewable energy, hydrogen, fossil fuels (highly efficient with carbon capture), and nuclear energy to achieve energy security and decarbonize the economy of the region in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islands face unique challenges on their journey towards achieving carbon neutrality by the mid-century, due to the lack of energy interconnections, limited domestic energy resources, extensive fossil fuel dependence, and high load variance requiring new technologies to balance demand and supply. At the same time, these challenges can be turned into a great opportunity for economic growth and the creation of jobs with non-interconnected islands having the potential to become transition frontrunners by adopting sustainable technologies and implementing innovative solutions. This paper uses an advanced energy–economy system modeling tool (IntE3-ISL) accompanied by plausible decarbonization scenarios to assess the medium- and long-term impacts of energy transition on the energy system, emissions, economy, and society of the island of Mayotte. The model-based analysis adequately captures the specificities of Mayotte and examines the complexity, challenges, and opportunities to decarbonize the island's non-interconnected energy system. The energy transition necessitates the adoption of ambitious climate policy measures and the extensive deployment of low- and zero-carbon technologies both in the demand and supply sides of the energy system, accounting for the unique characteristics of each individual sector, while sectoral integration is also important. To reduce emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, such as transportation and industry, the measures and technologies can include the installation and use of highly efficient equipment, the electrification of end uses (such as the widespread adoption of electric vehicles), the large roll-out of renewable energy sources, as well as the production and use of green hydrogen and synthetic fuels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decarbonisation of the building sector is crucial for Portugal's goal of achieving economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050. To mobilize communities towards energy efficiency measures, it is important to understand the primary drivers and barriers that must be overcome through policymaking. This paper aims to review existing Energy Policies and Actions (EPA) in Portugal and assess their effectiveness in improving Energy Efficiency (EE) and reducing CO2 emissions in the building sector. The Local Energy Planning Assistant (LEPA) tool was used to model, test, validate and compare the implementation of current and alternative EPAs in the North of Portugal, including the national EE plan. The results indicate that electrification of heating and cooling, EE measures, and the proliferation of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are crucial for achieving climate neutrality. The study found that the modelling of alternative EPAs can be improved to reduce investment costs and increase Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction. Among the alternatives assessed, the proposed one (Alternative 4) presents the best returns on investment in terms of cost savings and emissions reduction. It allows for 52% investment cost savings in the residential sector and 13% in the service sector when compared to the current national roadmap to carbon neutrality (Alternative 2). The estimated emission reduction in 2050 for Alternative 4 is 0.64% for the residential sector and 3.2% for the service sector when compared to Alternative 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new energy–economy system modelling approach, developed specifically for energy system planning in non-interconnected islands, aiming for decarbonization. Energy system planning is an essential tool to shape the energy transition to reach carbon neutrality in the medium- and long-term horizon. Islands, as small-scale energy systems, have a limited contribution to the global climate targets, but due to their geographical and natural limitations, they present the potential to become frontrunners in the clean energy transition, especially regarding the efficient use of resources. The specificities and complexities of geographical islands cannot be adequately covered by the available energy modelling tools and new advanced approaches need to be developed to provide the appropriate support in designing the future decarbonized energy systems at insular level. Our methodological approach follows the adaptation and customization of well-established energy–economy modelling tools towards the development of an integrated island-scale energy–economy system model, capturing energy demand and supply by sector, heating/cooling and mobility requirements, energy efficiency potentials and their complex interactions through energy prices, storage, flexibility services and sectoral integration. By soft-linking the energy and economy system modelling tools through the consistent exchange of model parameters and variables, we developed a fully fledged modelling framework called IntE3-ISL, designed for islands with a horizon up to 2050. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses decomposition analysis to investigate the key contributions to changes in greenhouse gas emissions in different scenarios. We derive decomposition formulas for the three highest-emitting sectors: power generation, industry, and transportation (both passenger and freight). These formulas were applied to recently developed 1.5 °C emission scenarios by the Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE), emphasising the role of renewables and lifestyle changes. The decomposition analysis shows that carbon capture and storage (CCS), both from fossil fuel and bioenergy burning, renewables and reducing carbon intensity provide the largest contributions to emission reduction in the scenarios. Efficiency improvement is also critical, but part of the potential is already achieved in the Baseline scenario. The relative importance of different emission reduction drivers is similar in the OECD (characterised by relatively high per capita income levels and emissions) and non-OECD (characterised by relatively high carbon intensities of the economy) region, but there are some noteworthy differences. In the non-OECD region, improving efficiency in industry and transport and increasing the share of renewables in power generation are more important in reducing emissions than in the OECD region, while CCS in power generation and electrification of passenger transport are more important drivers in the OECD region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]