Development of disaggregated energy use and greenhouse gas emission footprints in Canada’s iron, gold, and potash mining sectors

Abstract

This study develops the disaggregated energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission footprint for Canada’s iron, gold, and potash mining sectors. Currently, only high-level aggregated data at the sectoral and regional levels exists in the literature. Through bottom-up energy demand tree development, we identified end-use processes for each mining operation in these sectors. The energy intensities for each end-user were calculated and used in a bottom-up energy-environmental model to determine the associated end-use process GHG emissions. The results were then used to develop Sankey diagrams that allow us to visualize the energy and GHG emissions flows from resource to end use by energy use sector, fuel type, and various jurisdictions in Canada. The overall energy and GHG emission intensities for iron, gold, and potash mining are 0.7, 149.8, 1.8 GJ/Mg and 33, 4922, 158 kg CO2 eq./Mg, respectively. Firing, ventilation, and product drying and steam generation end-use devices had the highest energy use share of 42%, 20%, and 47% in iron, gold, and potash mining sectors, respectively, in 2016. Firing in iron mining, ore transport in gold mining, and product drying and steam generation in potash mining were responsible for 66%, 22%, and 34% of the respective total sectoral GHG emissions. 56% of the GHG emissions were from Saskatchewan, followed by Quebec (18%), and Newfoundland and Labrador (14%). The results from this study provide benchmarks to develop energy savings and GHG mitigation strategies useful for decision making.