Impacts of energy-saving and emission-reduction on sustainability of cement production

Abstract

How energy saving and emission reduction measures influence the interrelationship between carbon emissions and environmental sustainability of cement industry is not very clear, and this could lead to trade-off. This study investigates effects of three representative energy saving and emission reduction measures (steam Rankine cycle power generation (SRC), organic Rankine cycle power generation (ORC) and carbon capture and utilization (CCU)) on environmental performance of cement production using an improved emergy analysis and carbon emissions amounting. The proposed approach can investigate resource efficiency and emissions’ impact as well as carbon footprint of a system in study simultaneously. A cement enterprise, in Jilin Province in China, as a case, is explored using the proposed combined approach based on scenario analysis. The results illustrate that combination of SRC + ORC can promote environmental sustainability of cement production and carbon emission reduction by 4.61 % and 4.28 % respectively, mainly derived from SRC application (by 4.06 % and 3.81 %), (2) CCU can promote carbon emission reduction by 3.97 % but weaken the environmental sustainability by 2.10 % due to enhancing share of purchased nonrenewable electricity, and (3) combination of SRC + ORC + CCU can promote the environmental sustainability (by 2.43 %) and carbon emission reduction by 8.25 %. In addition, due to strong dependence on nonrenewable resources, combination of SRC + ORC + CCU is still limited in improvement of environmental performance of the industry. In the future, China’s cement industry should further enhance environmental performance of CCU and efficiency of ORC, as well as improve the resource structure of this industry.