In our quest for a sustainable future, understanding energy consumption and emissions in industrial sectors is more important than ever. This is particularly true for industries that are hard to decarbonize, which significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. However, obtaining detailed data on energy use and emissions at the site level is often a daunting challenge, primarily because such information is seldom available through public sources.

To address this critical issue, researchers from Eurac Research published a scientific article for the Journal Data in Brief which develops a groundbreaking top-down methodology that estimates site-level energy and emissions data for industrial sectors by utilizing and expanding upon publicly available information. This innovative approach is not only a step forward in energy system modeling, but it also lays the groundwork for creating targeted decarbonization strategies.

This innovative methodology has been applied to the Italian industrial sector for the year 2022, resulting in a comprehensive database detailing energy consumption across seven key energy sources: solid fossil fuels, manufactured gases, oil and petroleum products, natural gas, biofuels, non-renewable wastes, naphtha, and electricity.

The findings reveal that the chemical and petrochemical industries are the largest consumers of energy in Italy, followed by the iron and steel, non-metallic minerals, and paper and pulp sectors. Moreover, the geographical analysis highlights a concentration of major industrial facilities in northern Italy, with notable exceptions such as significant steel production in Taranto (in the south) and substantial petrochemical complexes in Sicily and Sardinia.

The integration of detailed energy consumption data at the site level is essential for advancing our decarbonization goals. With this new methodology, we take a significant step toward a clearer understanding of the energy landscape in hard-to-abate sectors, paving the way for more informed and effective climate action.

"While working on industrial decarbonization strategies, we consistently faced a crucial challenge: the lack of detailed, site-level energy consumption data. This gap makes it difficult to develop targeted solutions for industrial sectors. That's why we developed a top-down methodology to disaggregate national statistics into site-level energy consumption data. Our approach provides high granularity, breaking down energy use by temperature ranges (<100°C to >1000°C) and energy carriers for individual industrial facilities. The methodology integrates multiple open data sources - EU-ETS database, EUROSTAT Energy Balance statistics, and JRC-IDEES - to create a comprehensive mapping of industrial energy consumption. The work is highly replicable: the methodology can be applied to any EU country. This is crucial for understanding decarbonization pathways and planning future infrastructure needs" explains Matteo Giacomo Prina, co-author of the study.

“Considering the decarbonization of single industries or industrial sectors can hardly be done without considering the regional and / or national impact on the energy system. This is necessary to understand the cost on the one hand for the industry site itself for certain low carbon technologies, but as well the cost and burden for the overall energy system in order to host this new energy demand. The collected data and the used approach are the starting point for such analysis. Additionally, the data highlights that relevant energy consumptions are related to a fossil based national energy and mobility system (e.g. petrochemical). The collected data will allow to analyze in future more in detail which energy consumption has to be substituted in future low carbon societies and which ones might not be necessary anymore and the respective energy consumption might be strongly reduced” explains Wolfram Sparber, Head of Institute for Renewable Energy and co-author of the study.

Here the original article