Energy consumption and CO₂ emission in Taiwan’s iron-steel industries

ABSTRACT

This article investigates an empirical model to provide a reference for policies or regulations of energy consumption and greenhouse gas reduction in the iron and steel industry. Crude steel production is used to evaluate the energy consumption level and carbon dioxide emissions of Taiwan’s iron and steel industry during the period 1982 to 2009. Empirical findings show that the annual growth rate of blast furnaces is on average lower than the annual growth rate of electric arc furnaces. When economic growth and the effect from energy saving are considered, an inverted U-shaped trend is observed in the energy consumption of crude steel. Moreover, carbon dioxide emissions are found to be the lowest at the economic growth rate between 2% to 4% and an energy saving rate of 0.6%, corresponding to 24.35 and 32.36 million tons in 2010 and 2020, respectively, will reduce to 29.9 million tons in 2050.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon dioxid emissions
• energy consumption
• iron and steel industry
• Taiwan
• vector autoregression (VAR)

Acknowledgements

The financial support from Taiwan’s National Science Council (NSC98-3114-P-301-001 and NSC-99-2410-H-009-063) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ These projects include: the blast furnace expansion plan of China Steel Corp., the second blast furnace at Taiwan’s Dragon Steel Corp., the Kuan-Yin Plant expansion plan of Tung Ho Steel Enterprise Corp., and the electric furnace renovation plan of LoToun Steel.

² The P&M scenario not only makes the assumption of BAU, but also considers the assumption of energy savings technology.

³ The sum of crude steel production from blast furnaces and EAF equals total crude steel production.

⁴ This article assumes that the production technology and approach for energy use remain unchanged.