Economy and CO2 emissions trade-off: A systematic approach for optimizing investments in process integration measures under uncertainty

Journal article, 2010

In this paper we present a systematic approach for taking into account the resulting CO2 emissions reductions from investments in process integration measures in industry when optimizing those investments under economic uncertainty. The fact that many of the uncertainties affecting investment decisions are related to future CO2 emissions targets and policies implies that a method for optimizing not only economic criteria, but also greenhouse gas reductions, will provide better information to base the decisions on, and possibly also result in a more robust solution. In the proposed approach we apply a model for optimization of decisions on energy efficiency investments under uncertainty and regard the decision problem as a multiobjective programming problem. The method is applied to a case of energy efficiency investments at a chemical pulp mill. The case study is used to illustrate that the proposed method provides a good framework for decision-making about energy efficiency measures when considerations regarding greenhouse gas reductions influence the decisions. We show that by setting up the problem as a multiobjective programming model and at the same time incorporating uncertainties, the trade-off between economic and environmental criteria is clearly illustrated.