A system dynamics analysis of energy consumption and corrective policies in Iranian iron and steel industry

Nastaran Ansari and Abbas Seifi

Energy, 2012, vol. 43, issue 1, 334-343

Abstract: Iron and steel industry is the most energy intensive industrial sector in Iran. Long time subsidized energy has led to low energy efficiency in this industry. The sudden subsidy reform of energy prices in Iran is expected to have a great impact on steel production and energy consumption. A system dynamics model is presented in this paper to analyze steel demand, production and energy consumption in an integrated framework. A co-flow structure is used to show how subsidy reform affects energy consumption in the long run. The main focus of this paper is on direct and indirect natural gas consumption in the steel industry. Scrap based Electric Arc Furnace technology has been evaluated as an energy efficient way for steel making. The energy consumption in steel industry is estimated under various steel production and export scenarios while taking into account new energy prices to see the outlook of possible energy demand in steel industry over next 20 years. For example it is shown that under reference production scenario, potential reduction in gas consumption forced by complete removal of energy subsidy and utilizing scrap could lead to 85 billion cubic meters of gas saving over the next 20 years.

Keywords: System dynamics; Iron and steel industry; Energy consumption; Energy price; Subsidy reform; Steel production capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212003003
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:43:y:2012:i:1:p:334-343

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2012.04.020

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().