The Way Forward in Quantifying Extended Exergy Efficiency

Ricardo Manso, Tânia Sousa and Tiago Domingos
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Ricardo Manso: MARETEC—Marine, Environment and Technology Centre, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Instituto Superior Technical, University of Lisbon, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal
Tânia Sousa: MARETEC—Marine, Environment and Technology Centre, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Instituto Superior Technical, University of Lisbon, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 10, 1-32

Abstract: Extended exergy accounting (EEA) is a methodology which estimates the extended exergy cost (EEC) of a product or a service or the extended exergy efficiency (EEE) of a country or economic sector taking into account materials, energy, labour, capital, and environmental impact. The use of EEA results for policy or planning purposes has been hampered by: (1) the lack of data to quantify the EEC of most of the inputs, making it almost impossible to quantify the EEC of a product or service and (2) the lack of a conceptual framework to quantify in a consistent way the exergy of labour and capital. In this paper, we make a review of past studies to identify, synthesize, and discuss the different EEA methods. We identified 3 different EEA methods, that we further compare using the Portuguese Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishery (AFF) sector from 2000 to 2012. The equivalent exergies of labour and capital estimated for the AFF sector vary widely among the three EEA methodologies. We propose and test a new EEA methodology to estimate EEE which accounts for these fluxes in a more restricted scope but more consistently and that includes the Environmental Benefit (EB) that represents the capability of the forestry to capture carbon dioxide. Results show that the EEE of the Portuguese AFF sector has increased by 32% from 2000 to 2012.

Keywords: exergy; extended exergy accounting; efficiency; environmental assessment; agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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