Technologies-based potential analysis on saving energy and water of China's iron and steel industry

Water and energy conservation are indispensable commitments to achieve the sustainable development of the iron and steel industry. Hereby, this study established an evaluation framework to model the water and energy consumption in the iron and steel industry. This framework quantitatively assessed the energy and water saving with adoption of conventional and emerging technologies. Thirty mainstream technologies, among which 21 focused on energy saving and the remaining 9 focused on water saving, were selected for analysis. Five scenarios were developed to examine systematic water- and energy-saving potentials, including benchmark (BM) scenario, constrained product (CP) scenario, business as usual (BAU) scenario, and benefit/cost-driven (BD) scenario and strengthened policy (SP) scenario. The results show that the energy-saving potentials of BAU, BD and SP scenarios are 1.75 PJ, 1.21 PJ and 1.65 PJ, respectively. The water-saving potentials of BAU, BD and SP scenarios are 4.83 billion m³, 5.71 billion m³ and 9.15 billion m³, respectively. The specific energy consumption and water consumption decreased to 15.01-15.59 GJ/t and 54.13-58.77 m³/t, respectively. This study suggested to implement encouraging policies in prompt popularity rate of technologies, and promote energy-saving and water-saving technologies to achieve sustainable development of iron and steel industry.