Energy-efficient technology in the iron and steel industry: Simulation of new technology adoption with items

The Industrial Technology and Energy Modeling System (ITEMS)(referred to as ISTUM in Jaccard and Roop, 1990) is an end-use industrial modeling system that is technology based. Because it includes technologies in the process description of industry, it is possible to introduce new technologies to determine, based on economic and performance data, how rapidly these new technologies will penetrate the market (Hyman and Roop, 1996). As these new technologies penetrate the market, energy savings and, possibly, emissions reductions occur that can be tracked with the model as well. This report documents the use of ITEMS to investigate the impact of three new technologies under development with funding from the Department of Energy's Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT), that apply to the iron and steel industry. While the results of this application are interesting, this exercise points out how important it is to understand how the technologies work and how they make a difference. This report shows that ITEMS can be a useful tool in estimating market penetration of new technologies and the resulting energy savings, but these results are only as reliable as the data. If the model is to be used to compare technologies, the technical data concerning these technologies must be collected using the same set of assumptions and with the same vision of what characterizes a technology. While an effort has been made to understand how these technologies work, there is no assurance that the data used for this analysis were, indeed, collected using the same vision and the same set of assumptions. The report is organized into five additional sections. The next provides a brief overview of ITEMS and describes how the technical information about OIT projects is used in the model. The third section describes the three technologies that were introduced into ITEMS and reports the relevant data for those projects. The fourth section describes the iron and steel industry, as characterized in ITEMS, in which the data are embedded. This section also provides an overview of the major assumptions that define the simulations that are run for each technology. The fifth section then reports results of the model simulations, showing the rate of penetration of the technologies and the energy savings that result from the penetration of the OIT project technologies. A final section concludes the report