Energy Efficiency Indicators for Industry in Korea

초록

This study aims at developing energy efficiency indicators for the manufacturing sector as means of analysing energy consumption patterns and assessing energy conservation and CO2 mitigation potentials. The energy use in Korea's manufacturing sector in general and Korea's steel industry in special are merely analysed to identify data and analytical tools required for the development of energy efficiency indicators for industry. This study tries to find out the energy consumption patterns in the Korean manufacturing sector, which has grown very fast since early 1980s. The growth of gross domestic product (GDP) was led by the manufacturing sector, the value added of which amounted to 30 % of GDP in 1996 and which grew by more than 10 % per year in the period 1981 to 1996. The rapid growth of the sector has resulted in big increase in the energy consumption, as Korea has been still in the process of the so-called "heavy and chemical" industrialization. The sector consumed about 46 % of the country's final energy in 1996. First, this study applies economic as well as physical energy indicators to answer the question of how efficiently the Korean manufacturing sector uses energy. Second, This study tries also to compare physical energy efficiency indicators of Korea, Japan and France. Furthermore, this study analyse to some extent in depth the energy use in the Korean steel industry. It tries to compare energy intensities of individual processes of the Korean steel industry with other countries. This study comes soon to an end that data on energy consumption is not sufficient to analyse the energy consumption patterns in the Korean manufacturing sector. In fact, data availability has been the main obstacle for the analysis of energy consumption patterns and the formulation of energy savings and CO2 mitigation policies in Korea. To the end, this study proposed strategies to develop energy efficiency indicators for Korea.