Energy, material and emissions flow models of the United States Chemical industry

This study is devoted to developing methodologies to construct scaled energy, material and emission flow models of the U.S. Chemical industry. It was our objective to demonstrate a methodology that balances energy and material flow models for products produced by the Industrial Gas Manufacturing sector to U.S. production, energy use, and emissions for the industry for 1998. Such a demonstration would provide a way to extend this work to other sectors of the chemical industry, thus providing policy makers with a reliable way to assess the performance of these industries with regard to improvements in energy and material use and emissions over time. Unfortunately, the energy and material balance models currently available in the literature are not adequate to this task.; This study is intended to serve for the purpose of measuring national benefits in reduced energy and material consumption, and identification of R&D opportunities to reduce emissions. Manufacturing energy flow analysis part of this study is characterized by two types of models: an energy process-step model and an energy end-use model. An energy process-step model shows energy inputs and outputs at each step of an industrial process, which is obtained from an engineering analysis for a typical plant in the sector. Alternatively, an energy end-use model provides basis to calibrate the energy process-step model using national data. It allocates combustible fuel and renewable energy inputs among generic end-uses including intermediate conversions through onsite power and steam generation. The material flow model represents mass inputs and outputs for an industrial process, whereas the emission flow model provides CO2, SO2 and NOx emissions from both prime movers and industrial processes. However, due to the lack of sufficient material flow and energy process-step models found in the literature, it was not possible to apply the calibration methodology developed in this dissertation. Once credible quantitative models are available, the approach developed herein can be used to complete the calibration in the future.; The energy, material and emissions models are an attempt to give an overall picture of energy and raw material consumption for the purpose of industrial gas production. They also attempted to show CO2, SO2 and NOx emissions as a consequence of power generation and industrial processes in this industry.; The approach to creating these models, consistent with national data, has been shown to be applicable to other industries. When used in conjunction with similar models for other years, these models can be used to identify the changes and trends in energy use along with the environmental consequences of emissions from specific industries. While this has been demonstrated for some industries, the current state of the energy and material balance models do not allow this for the Industrial Gas Manufacturing sector as a whole.