Data on ages of industrial facilities in Europe: blast furnaces and cement kilns

[Tom Brown]

Hi folks,

As many of you know, data on industrial facilities is hard to come by.
Projects like hotmaps have made great strides in munging data e.g. from
the ETS to get geo-referenced datasets:

https://gitlab.com/hotmaps/industrial_sites/industrial_sites_Industrial_Database

but what I would also like is the ages of the blast furnaces and cement
kilns. I'd like to be able to e.g. reproduce at plant level Figure 2
from this Agora Energiewende report:

https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/publications/a-clean-industry-package-for-the-eu-impulse/

which shows the production capacity in Mt/a requiring reinvestment by 2030.

Does anyone have a database of industrial plants with ages / last
upgrades / reinvestment requirements?

Obviously this is important both for research and policy action.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance!

Best wishes,

Tom


--
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics (IAI)

Tom Brown (he/him)
Research Group Leader, Energy System Modelling

Phone: +49 721 608 25737
Fax: +49 721 608 22602
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[Tom Brown]

Hi all,

Thanks for all your help with this! I was flooded with data after also
asking on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/nworbmot/status/1361367769867051021

In summary: there is a lot of active work in this area with many
datasets coming online in the next few months. The data often has holes
in it, since there is no reporting duty on the ages of privately owned
industrial facilities.

# Steel

The go-to commercial source has been the VDEh Plantfacts database, now
for sale here:

http://gsis.worldsteeldynamics.com/

The rates for access were quite reasonable in the past.

Global Energy Monitor will soon publish a global open database, which is
available at the moment behind a registration wall before it's ready:

https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-steel-plant-tracker/

See data in their wiki:

https://www.gem.wiki/Category:Steel_plants

It's not clear how good the data are on e.g. the last date of blast
furnace relining.

Ember UK Steel Database:

https://ember-climate.org/project/uk-steel/


Another major think tank will publish its data online soon.



# Cement

CEMBUREAU used to publish the World Cement Directory which was used by some.


# Combined Database

Was compiled for this paper by Johan Rootzén & Filip Johnsson:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.03.057


I will maybe update the wiki as more data comes in.

Best wishes,

Tom

[Robbie Morrison]

Hi Tom, all

Gavin Starks hosted a presentation today — soon to be uploaded somewhere under CC‑BY‑4.0 — on the Icebreaker One Open Energy project.  Toward the end of the presentation, Gavin indicated that he believed that increasing levels of mandated data — meaning data that must be published by law — was likely to assist the United Kingdom pursue its net zero commitments.  Icebreaker work closely with the UK government and so I took Gavin's remarks to be well grounded.

The corollary is, I guess, that we modelers — and not just in the UK — should push more for the kind of information that Tom sought to be subject to statutory reporting.

with best wishes, Robbie

-- 
Robbie Morrison
Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49.30.612-87617

[naudl...@gmail.com]

Hi Tom and others,

Thanks a lot. This will help me a lot to improve the industry sector in our modelling!

Best Wishes

Naud

------
PhD candidate on sector-coupling in socio-technical energy transition models

NEON Research

Eindhoven University of Technology

M: n.lo...@tue.nl

Op dinsdag 16 februari 2021 om 16:05:41 UTC+1 schreef Robbie Morrison:

[Tom Brown]

Hi all,

A quick update: the Global Energy Monitor's Global Steel Plant Tracker
(GSPT) is now online with a fancy map and dashboard:

https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-steel-plant-tracker/

Unfortunately the data on the ages of plants is spotty, and the
important data on the last blast furnace relining date (should happen
every 20 years) is missing, but this could be added over time by combing
through news reports. I have this data now shared privately, but one
could try to match it with openly-available reports.

Best wishes,

Tom

[Tom Brown]

And another update (2021 is the year of industrial data it seems):

The Global Infrastructure Emission Database

http://gidmodel.org/

from Tsinghua University

A global database of power plants, steel plants and cement plants with
their CO2 emissions (cement split between process and fuel-based CO2
emissions).

The data is available but not open, and requires registration and
agreement to Terms and Conditions to acquire.

It's great that this data is available in a unified database for such a
wide global scope.

However if the authors were going to ask me for improvement suggestions
(which I'm going to give anyway) they would be:

- Much of the useful data (ages of plants, production capacity of cement
plants, geo-coordinates, CO2 split by process for iron and steel) is
blanked out. The data from commercial sources I can understand, but the
geo-coordinates were gathered by the GID team from Google Maps, so
surely these can be shared?

- A standard open licence, like "Creative Commons Attribution" (CC BY),
would provide users with some legal certainty when using it, and provide
a way for the authors to get attribution without forcing users to sign
non-standard T&C. It would also make the data useable and re-useable
with other open sources, and maybe encourage others to contribute
towards filling the gaps only available in commercial databases.

- A complicated registration process will reduce the number of users
this project reaches.

Hopefully these issues can be addressed over time!

Best wishes,

Tom

[Robbie Morrison]

Hi Tom, all

Just copying a paragraph from a recent (relatively obscure) forum posting of mine because there are other data trends worth highlighting too.

On one hand (as Tom indicates), more industrial data is becoming publicly available, although not always open licensed.  On the other hand, large private commercial databases are available under confidentiality and usually upon payment.

But we are also starting to see data brokerage systems being developed, founded on non‑disclosure and voluntary sign‑on. These schemes embed their own internal legal systems covering accreditation, oversight, dispute resolution, and sanction. But that data is not public in any sense and should only be used for scientific research or public policy analysis as a last resort. Two examples are the Icebreaker One Open Energy platform and the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU). The Open Energy platform should go beta live toward the end of 2021, while the OSDU is scheduled for launch at the end of this month, March 2021. Subsurface data includes drill well logs, seismic investigations, and similar artifacts produced during hydrocarbon exploration and recovery. The OSDU project plans to rebrand in due course and cover above ground assets such as renewables potentials and high‑resolution windfarm SCADA traffic. Use of the qualifier "open" in the context of data brokerage is highly questionable. Data brokerage schemes may be driven variously by considerations of personal privacy, commercial sensitivity, cost recovery, business opportunity, and/or sector viability. Such schemes will doubtless play a central role in future smart systems architectures.

There are also a number of well‑established closed consortium databases stocked using majority public funding.  Two such examples are GTAP and EcoInvent, covering international trade and lifecycle assessment respectively.  These and similar databases are now being re-implemented as open data projects, again using majority public funding.  This current situation represents waste and delay that we can ill‑afford.  Moreover, open community curation has been repeatedly shown to work.  (Conversely, much of the material under statutory reporting is in poor shape and, in some cases, actively and intentionally degraded by providers.)

These various forms of data provision — publicly funded consortia databases aside — have a place of course.

But I am ever mindful of what the the European Commission describes as "privately‑held information [of] public interest".  And that we have three decades to get the carbon out of the system if we want to bequeath a habitable planet to ourselves.  I've been campaigning on climate change for 31 years and I am starting to get very nervous.  Moreover, most of the information issues we face could be easily and rapidly solved through suitable law reform and relatively modest public expenditure.

with best wishes, Robbie

-- 
Robbie Morrison
Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49.30.612-87617