Modeling the response of industry to environmental constraint

International audienceFor industry, and especially for large energy consuming industries, energy prices and environmental constraints are the main drivers towards energy efficiency. By this time, many energy efficiency technologies exist on the market and some technological breakthrough processes (e.g. based on Carbon Capture and Storage CCS, or electrolysis in steel industry) are in study to ban traditional CO2 emitting processes. But their adoption will depend mainly on their economical competitiveness. Emission trading is a new instrument that can modify industry's response by adding a cost to CO2 emissions. We use a prospective energy model to assess the response of industry to environmental constraint. It calculates the best economical choices for technology adoption in large energy consuming industries. The modeling tool is the TIMES model (from the family of the MARKAL models). It is a mathematical model of the energy system of one or several regions that provides a technology-rich basis for estimating energy dynamics over a multi-period horizon. We illustrate our work by several energy-intensive industrial sectors. We include a full description of multi-option processes involved in the production of paper, glass, cement and steel, providing typical energy consumption in each process step. We identify, for each large energy-consuming industry and for different carbon constraints, the best technologies or optimisations to reduce production cost, and we calculate the energy savings potential and the corresponding CO2 emission reductions