Abstract
Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in industrial plants usually has multiple purposes, including mandatory reporting, shareholder and stakeholder communication, developing key performance indicators (KPIs), or informing cost-effective mitigation options. Current carbon accounting systems, such as the one required by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), ignore the system context in which emissions occur. This hampers the identification and evaluation of comprehensive mitigation strategies considering linkages between materials, energy, and emissions. Here, we propose a carbon accounting method based on multilevel material flow analysis (MFA), which aims at addressing this gap. Using a Norwegian primary aluminum production plant as an example, we analyzed the material stocks and flows within this plant for total mass flows of goods as well as substances such as aluminum and carbon. The results show that the MFA-based accounting (i) is more robust than conventional tools due to mass balance consistency and higher granularity, (ii) allows monitoring the performance of the company and defines meaningful KPIs, (iii) can be used as a basis for the EU ETS reporting and linked to internal reporting, (iv) enables the identification and evaluation of systemic solutions and resource efficiency strategies for reducing emissions, and (v) has the potential to save costs.
Highlights
The industry sector contributed just over 30% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2010,1 and the aluminum value chain alone embodied in 2009 approximately 1.1% of the global GHG emissions, whereof 90% was associated with primary production,[2] which is expected to keep soaring for decades.[3]
As illustrated here for the two smelting lines of the plant, our approach enables the design of a set of system-based indicators that integrates both resource efficiency and GHG emission levels
The real efficiency of the reduction process occurring inside the pots of the second smelting line is hidden by the spill: if it were plugged, all things being equal, it would perform better than the first line
Summary
The industry sector contributed just over 30% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2010,1 and the aluminum value chain alone embodied in 2009 approximately 1.1% of the global GHG emissions, whereof 90% was associated with primary production,[2] which is expected to keep soaring for decades.[3]. Industrial installations are only required to report their total direct GHG emissions, even though they can comprise several technical units with different inputs and outputs These highly aggregated results have little operational meaning and are unsuitable for comparison, especially since the interpretation of the accounting rules may differ from one site to another.[9] the data can have large uncertainties and may not be mass balance consistent, which is not addressed by the current accounting methodology. This reduces the robustness of the accounting and increases the risk of not detecting errors coming from uncertainties or a poorly defined system (missing flows or stocks). The EU ETS only covers a limited number of GHGs and does not give credit for improving the end-of-life (EoL) management of waste flows (through better separation, reuse, or recycling)
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