Promotion of Benchmarking Tools for Energy Conservation in Energy Intensive Industries in China (2008 – 2009)

Promotion of Benchmarking Tools for Energy Conservation in Energy Intensive Industries in China (2008 – 2009)

This tendered project is part of the activities under the EU-China Energy Environment Programme (EEP), which is established to correspond to the political intent of the Chinese Government and the European Commission to further strengthen the EU-China co-operation in the area of energy.

Resource-saving and building an environment-friendly society is the main target of the Chinese government on the course of sustainable development. In the 11-Five-Year-Plan, China plans to reduce energy consumption of the total GDP by 20% till the end of this planning period. To achieving this goal, China must motivate the involvement of all walks of life to contribute.

Industry is the major energy consumer in China, which takes 70% share of the whole nation’s entire energy consumption. Energy intensive industry in the key energy consuming industry takes the lion’s share of industrial energy consumption. According to the statistics, in the year of 2006, China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) accounts for 5% in the world, yet its energy consumption accounts for 15~20% of the world total, especially obvious in energy intensive sectors. For example the electricity consumption per ton of steel produced in China is up to 3~5 times higher than for best available technology. Similar in electricity production here coal consumption per kWh is about 355g, significantly higher than in Japan, Germany and the United States, even higher than that in Korea and India. This signals a substantial potential for energy-saving and efficiency gains. Experience in China has shown that the key problem in typical industrial plants – from the largest to the smallest – is a failure to measure process and environmental performance to indicate the actual situation in the plant. Therefore most management decisions towards energy and resource efficiency have to be based on incomplete data. A further key element lacking in most Chinese plants is the comprehensive analysis of the typical routine data found in every plant. Without a full understanding of the current plant performance with respect to energy consumption and environmental emissions, the management lacks a firm basis for identifying deficiencies and making the relevant improvements. A great deal of improvement can normally be made in every plant by monitoring process parameters regularly and managing the process operations. Our efforts therefore focus on the measurement of performance – specifically energy – to indicate the current situation in an industrial plant. From this point, improvements can be made and progress towards practical and achievable targets can be monitored. The effective adoption of performance monitoring principles in any enterprise depends not on technology but on good management that is able to apply the basic tools to achieve greater success in business and reduced greenhouse gas emissions at modest cost.

The purpose of this contract is to promote benchmarking as a tool for energy conservation in energy intensive industry in China. This project will contribute to Chinese government’s goal to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP by 20 percent over the 11th Five-Year Plan’s period (2006-2010). On the one hand, the goal should be achieved by implementing pilot studies and demonstration projects in high energy intensive enterprise, and also by developing effective benchmarking tool kits. On the other hand, training courses, dissemination and promotion activities and policy recommendations seminars would also make a great contribute to the objective.

CENTRIC AUSTRIA INTERNATIONAL is the major international partner to this project and is contributing with CAI manager Gerhard Weihs and CAI expert XIN Mingyi two of four key experts to the project.