Environmental Valuation & Cost-Benefit News

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/world/asia/04japan.html?th&emc=th

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Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less.

It is also the only industrial country that sustained government investment in energy research even when energy became cheap again.

According to the International Energy Agency, ... Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. ...

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s .... It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan’s strides in efficiency are clearest in heavy industries like steel, which are the nation’s biggest consumers of power. From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies...

The results are visible at the Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay.... Massive steel ducts snake ...capture heat and gases that had previously been released into the air or burned off as waste. Now, they are used to power generators that produce 90 percent of the plant’s electricity.

Such innovations allow the mill to produce a ton of steel using 35 percent less energy than it did three decades ago ... If the global steel industry adopted Japanese conservation measures, it could reduce carbon emissions by some 300 million tons a year.
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Its government is pushing an initiative that could set Japan’s levels of energy conservation as targets for global industries. Mr. Fukuda has proposed what is called a sector-based approach to new targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. But the generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders took off three years ago, after energy prices began rising.

Since then, the company has sold 64 units, mainly through a joint venture in China.
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By Martin Fackler
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/world/asia/04japan.html?th&emc=th
Published July 4, 2008