Can a hierarchical ordering of alternative technological concepts for decarbonizing industrial energy systems minimize mitigation costs?

Integration of alternative technological concepts such as switching to alternative fuels, advanced energy efficiency, and carbon capture & storage in existing industrial energy systems can prove highly effective at minimising emissions; however, their adoption is low since solutions using these concepts raise costs considerably. The hypothesis of this work is a hierarchical combination of these concepts can reduce mitigation cost. To this end a mixed method approach is applied combining energy simulation with a novel Mixed Integer Linear Programming model developed to explore 48 alternative solutions to make industrial energy systems more sustainable. The method was applied to the most common industrial energy systems configurations. Results show that the added cost of integrating alternative technological concepts are lowered when energy efficiency via direct heat recovery is explored first in an optimisation-based hierarchy of options. The hierarchy is advanced energy efficiency before fuel and technology switching or integrating carbon capture and storage. This means process integration can pay for steeper reductions in carbon emissions. Integrating alternative technological concepts optimally and hierarchically reduced emissions by 61%, and costs by 55.7% compared to a partial integration for a heat-only business-as-usual industrial energy systems. Even though switching to an alternative fuel (blue hydrogen) reduces carbon emissions by 72%, costs increase by at least 3% compared to a system using fuel gas and fuel oil. A hierarchical integration of blue hydrogen reduces cost by 47% and carbon emissions by 88.7%. Partial integration of carbon capture and storage reduces carbon emissions by 36% but costs increase by 89%, with full integration using optimisation and the hierarchy costs only increase by 6.3%. therefore, the cost-effectiveness of integrating alternative technological concepts is highly influenced by the hierarchy which seeks to minimise demand for energy from industrial processes first, then increase the supply efficiency of industrial energy systems, and before switching to alternative fuels and technologies

Recent developments in commodity modeling : a World Bankfocus

This paper provides insights into international commodity modeling by providing a survey of recent developments in this modeling area and by explaining how these developments interacted with and were applied within the Bank. Following a brief introduction into basic commodity modeling purposes, a fuller description is given of the nature of the various methodologies, and of recent advances in their formulation. The Bank's employment of these methodologies in constructing and operating a variety of commodity models is then discussed. While a perspective is provided regarding historical modeling developments within the Bank, most of the review is concerned with the Bank's recent success in utilizing these models for forecasting and market analysis purposes.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Geographical Information Systems

Large-scale introduction of forest-based biorefineries: Actor perspectives and the impacts of a dynamic biomass market

Large-scale implementation of forest-based biofuel production will have an impact on biomass prices, something which in turn will affect biofuel production costs. The profitability of emerging biofuel production technologies is usually assessed using techno-economic or market approaches. While techno-economic approaches have a detailed description of technologies within plant-level or supply chain system boundaries, they build on exogenously given static biomass prices. Conversely, market approaches have a consistent description of the economic system including market interactions for prices within local or national boundaries, but they generally lack technological depth. This paper combines these two approaches using an iterative framework for a case study optimising the production cost of liquefied biomethane (LBG) using different configurations of sawmill-integrated biomass gasification. Cost estimates are developed using system boundaries surrounding a LBG production plant, and the Swedish national borders, reflecting the plant-owner and policymaker perspectives, respectively. The results show that different plant configurations are favoured depending on the choice between minimising the biofuel production cost for the plant-owner or for the policymaker. Market dynamics simulated by the iterative procedure show that a direct policy support of 36–56 EUR/MWh would be needed to sustain large-scale LBG production, which is 12–31% higher than the necessary policy support estimated based on static biomass prices

The impact of Brexit on designing a material-based global supply chain network for Asian manufacturers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate effects on global supply chain reconfigured in the customs duty rate of parts and specific material types brought about by Brexit and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Design/methodology/approach – The supply chain network is modeled and formulated using mixed integer programming. Numerical experiments are conducted using bill of materials with information such as the procurement cost of each part, 3D-CAD and an industry census. Findings – The experiments indicates that if the customs duty rate increases by Brexit, manufacturers would be necessary to restructure supply chain configuration and locate the domestic factory and market. Additionally, when the UK leaves the EU and joins the TPP, there is a case where the total cost decreases in the global supply chain network compared to the baseline without Brexit. Therefore, it is reasonable for the UK to join the TPP. Practical implications – The study shows how a new trading rules from non-partnership countries can critically disrupt existing global supply chain equilibrium. Asian manufacturers should evaluate a move to more local sourcing, opening new facilities and setting up warehouses to stock finished goods or raw materials in different trading areas to overcome any barriers to the goods movement. Originality/value – This study enables us to quantitatively evaluate what there are opportunities or cost increasing risks by the selection of supply chain configuration for Asian manufacturers by political and economic factors of each country such as Brexit and participation in TPP

Throughput and Yield Improvement for a Continuous Discrete-Product Manufacturing System

A seam-welded steel pipe manufacturing process has mainly four distinct major design and/or operational problems dealing with buffer inventory, cutting tools, pipe sizing and inspection-rework facility. The general objective of this research is to optimally solve these four important problems to improve the throughput and yield of the system at a minimum cost. The first problem of this research finds the optimal buffer capacity of steel strip coils to minimize the maintenance and downtime related costs. The total cost function for this coil feeding system is formulated as a constrained non-linear programming (NLP) problem which is solved with a search algorithm. The second problem aims at finding the optimal tool magazine reload timing, magazine size and the order quantity for the cutting tools. This tool magazine system is formulated as a mixed-integer NLP problem which is solved for minimizing the total cost. The third problem deals with different type of manufacturing defects. The profit function of this problem forms a binary integer NLP problem which involves multiple integrals with several exponential and discrete functions. An exhaustive search method is employed to find the optimum strategy for dealing with the defects and pipe sizing. The fourth problem pertains to the number of servers and floor space allocations for the off-line inspection-rework facility. The total cost function forms an integer NLP structure, which is minimized with a customized search algorithm. In order to judge the impact of the above-mentioned problems, an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) measure, coined as monetary loss based regression (MLBR) method, is also developed as the fifth problem to assess the performance of the entire manufacturing system. Finally, a numerical simulation of the entire process is conducted to illustrate the applications of the optimum parameters setting and to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the simulated system. The successful improvement of the simulated system supports this research to be implemented in a real manufacturing setup. Different pathways shown here for improving the throughput and yield of industrial systems reflect not only to the improvement of methodologies and techniques but also to the advancement of new technology and national economy

Planning the petrochemical industry in Kuwait using economic and safety objectives

Kuwait, one of the major oil producing countries in the Middle East, is in the process of globalizing its operation in petroleum and petrochemical production. Kuwaiti officials have expressedin terest in acceleratingd evelopmento f the country's relatively small petrochemical industry. The development is to produce new valuable chemicals from the available basic feedstock chemicals. Two of the important planning objectives for a petrochemical industry are the economic gain and the industrial safety involved in the development. For the economic evaluation of the industry, and for the proposed final product chemicals in the development, a long-range plan is needed to identify trends in chemical prices. The chemical prices are related to the oil price, which is considered an important motivator for the whole petrochemical industry. Price trend modelling is performed to be able to forecast these prices for the planning horizon. Safety, as the second objective, is considered in this study as the risk of chemical plant accidents. Risk, when used as an objective fimction, has to have a simple quantitative form to be easily evaluated for a large number of possible plants in the petrochemical network. The simple quantitative form adopted is a risk index that enables the number of people affected by accidents resulting in chemical releases to be estimated. The two objectives, when combined with constraints describing the desired or the possible structure of the industry, will form an optimization model. For this study, the petrochemical planning model consists of a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to select the best routes from the basic feedstocks available in Kuwait to the desired final products with multiple objective functions. The economic and risk objectives usually have conflicting needs. The presence of several conflicting objectives is typical when planning. In many cases, where optimization techniques are utilized, the multiple objectives are simply aggregated into one single objective function. Optimization is then conducted to get one optimal result. However, many results are obtained for different aggregations of the objectives and eventually a set of solutions is obtained. Other tools, such as strategic tools, are used to select the best solution from the set. This study, which is concerned with economic and risk objectives, leads to the identification of important factors that affect the petrochemical industry. Moreover, the procedure, of modelling and model solution, can be used to simplify the decisionmaking for complex or large systems such as the petrochemical industry. It presents the use of simple multiple objective optimization tools within a petrochemical planning tool formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. Such a tool is particularly useful when the decision-making task must be discussed and approved by officials who often have little experience with optimization theories