Challenges and Prospects of Steelmaking Towards the Year 2050

The world steel industry is strongly based on coal/coke in ironmaking, resulting in huge carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to approximately 7% of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. As the world is experiencing a period of imminent threat owing to climate change, the steel industry is also facing a tremendous challenge in next decades. This themed issue makes a survey on the current situation of steel production, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions, as well as cross-sections of the potential methods to decrease CO2 emissions in current processes via improved energy and materials efficiency, increasing recycling, utilizing alternative energy sources, and adopting CO2 capture and storage. The current state, problems and plans in the two biggest steel producing countries, China and India are introduced. Generally contemplating, incremental improvements in current processes play a key role in rapid mitigation of specific emissions, but finally they are insufficient when striving for carbon neutral production in the long run. Then hydrogen and electrification are the apparent solutions also to iron and steel production. The book gives a holistic overview of the current situation and challenges, and an inclusive compilation of the potential technologies and solutions for the global CO2 emissions problem

Energy Efficiency

This book is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date books written on Energy Efficiency. The readers will learn about different technologies for energy efficiency policies and programs to reduce the amount of energy. The book provides some studies and specific sets of policies and programs that are implemented in order to maximize the potential for energy efficiency improvement. It contains unique insights from scientists with academic and industrial expertise in the field of energy efficiency collected in this multi-disciplinary forum

Summaries of FY 1997 Research in the Chemical Sciences

The objective of this program is to expand, through support of basic research, knowledge of various areas of chemistry, physics and chemical engineering with a goal of contributing to new or improved processes for developing and using domestic energy resources in an efficient and environmentally sound manner. Each team of the Division of Chemical Sciences, Fundamental Interactions and Molecular Processes, is divided into programs that cover the various disciplines. Disciplinary areas where research is supported include atomic, molecular, and optical physics; physical, inorganic, and organic chemistry; chemical energy, chemical physics; photochemistry; radiation chemistry; analytical chemistry; separations science; heavy element chemistry; chemical engineering sciences; and advanced battery research. However, traditional disciplinary boundaries should not be considered barriers, and multi-disciplinary efforts are encouraged. In addition, the program supports several major scientific user facilities. The following summaries describe the programs

Energy Materials Coordinating Committee (EMaCC): Fiscal year 1996. Annual technical report

The DOE Energy Materials Coordinating Committee (EMaCC) serves primarily to enhance coordination among the Department`s materials programs and to further effective use of materials expertise within the Department. These functions are accomplished through the exchange of budgetary and planning information among program managers and through technical meetings/workshops on selected topics involving both DOE and major contractors. In addition, EMaCC assists in obtaining materials-related inputs for both intra- and interagency compilations. The EMaCC reports to the Director of the Office of Energy Research in his or her capacity as overseer of the technical programs of the Department. This annual technical report is mandated by the EMaCC terms of reference. This report summarizes EMaCC activities for FY 1996 and describes the materials research programs of various offices and divisions within the Department

Patterns of world trade: an application of network complexity analysis

This thesis is a contribution to network complexity analysis, which has shown a high degree of explanatory power in visualising the process of economic diversification, both across countries and over time. The thesis comprises a stage-setting introduction, a primer on the network complexity analysis and measures of economic complexity, three core chapters and a concluding chapter that summarises the key findings and makes suggestions for further research. The first core chapter (Chapter 3) aims to place network complexity analysis, which has been criticised as a purely data driven analytical tool, within a theoretical economic context. By building a bridge between the mainstream theories of comparative advantage and the new analytical tool, the chapter demonstrates that the predictions of the theory of comparative advantage are borne out in the network analysis. The next two chapters are novel empirical applications of network complexity analysis, using a structural construct called the product space. Chapter 4 deals with the impact of trade liberalisation on export performance, covering 96 liberalisation episodes in 129 countries over 1962–2012. The first stage of the analysis involves constructing measures of product emergence. These are then used in econometric analysis to examine the average within-country impact of trade liberalisation on product emergence and diffusion. The findings indicate that trade liberalisation is associated with an increase in the rate of product emergence and a moderate reorientation toward products that are more dissimilar to those in the pre-reform export composition. Chapter 5 explores the implications of global production sharing on network complexity analysis. The approach taken is based on a systematic separation of production-sharing based trade (PSB trade) from the standard (reported) trade data. PSB trade is further disaggregated into parts and components and final assembly. It is found that failure to distinguish between PSB trade and standard horizontal trade tends to upwardly bias the complexity rankings of exports of some developing countries. This is because some developing countries are engaged in assembling and testing some parts and components while others engage in final assembly. It is also found that parts and components are clustered in a densely connected core of the product space alongside relevant final products and have a higher level of average within-group proximity relative to final products, indicating higher average co-export potential. In the case of the machinery and transport equipment sector, parts and component exports tend to emerge prior to the export of final products, suggesting that global production sharing could act as a mechanism in the diffusion process from the periphery to the core of the product space