Aluminum is an essential material for the construction and development of national economy, however the GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions caused by its production have been noticed by China’s government gradually. In this study, the life cycle energy consumption and GHG emissions caused by the production of primary aluminum in different years in China were calculated, and the correlation between GHG emissions and some important factors i.e. resource consumption and procedure energy consumption was analyzed. The final results show that for GHG emissions, electricity is the major contributor that accounts for 68.5% of the total, followed by the emissions of anode effect and calcination of limestone, which accounts for 7.9% and 6.8% respectively, and the percentages other factors account for less than 6%. The results also show that the calcination of limestone, combustion of coal gas and consumption of electricity are the three main factors which have the largest correlation degree with GHG emissions, and their correlation degrees are 0.96, 0.94 and 0.90 respectively. Therefore, decreasing the consumption of coal gas and improving the efficiency of the calcination of limestone are effective ways to decrease the GHG emissions of primary aluminum production.
Based on life cycle assessment, analysis of energy consumption and other environment load by steel production in Chinese typical iron and steel industry was carried out. The process accounted for the most environment load was found by studying the different processes in steel production route. The results indicate that the most important process is blast furnace (BF) which is the major factor of CO2 and CO emissions, and contributes most to globe warming potential (GWP) and photochemical ozone creation potential (POCP).
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