Exergy Ecology and Democracy
Exergy Ecology and Democracy
Exergy Ecology and Democracy
PROPOSAL FOR AN EXERGY TAX” 30 YEARS AFTER - PART 2: EXERGY AND U.N.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
*1
Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, PT; Atlantic International University, Honolulu, HI, USA
2
Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, PT
3
Circolo Carlo Cattaneo, Parma, Italy
*
Corresponding author; E-mail: [email protected]
1 Introduction
Goran Wall presented “Exergy, ecology and democracy: concepts of a vital society or a
proposal for an exergy tax” [1] in 1993. It has defined a robust framework for sustainability. After
thirty years, it has maintained fundamental importance also in today’s scenario.
In light of Wall’s pioneering vision, Part 1 [2] of this paper evidences that the U.N. Sustainable
Development Goals [3] and Paris Agreement [4] are not declarations of principles but necessary and
demanding processes. In addition, the transition measures deployed by national governments and
industrial and commercial companies remain insufficient to create a sustainable society [5], which can
reduce the menaces for humankind caused by climate change and global warming. Sustainability
remains a problem that interferes with national and economic interests. Therefore, it is essential to
rethink and redefine economic models, globalization, agriculture, energetic and industrial production,
logistics and waste management [6, 7].
Bartelmus [8] has analyzed the indicators of prosperity and well-being and their effects on the
necessary measures for supporting the development of the economy, environment and society. He has
shown that the data and the consistency of indicators adopted by decision-makers present evident
problems. Societal and environmental indicators affect economic activity, quality of life and
environment, and prosperity of people and nations. U.N. SDGs and Paris Agreement require observing
that incomplete or inadequate information leads to insufficient estimations and limits the effects of
political decisions [9-10].
Bartelmus [11] has evidenced the need to improve policy guidelines and adopt effective and
coherent accounting methods to analyze and revise political procedures toward sustainable social and
economic development. The persisting polarization of the debate between environmentalists and
economists is often a misleading element in the path toward a more sustainable society with the
capability of integrating the principles from the environmental sciences and the economy.
Goran Wall [1] has demonstrated that Thermodynamics can define a third way in the debate
toward sustainability and reduction of climate change [12-14]. The thermodynamic way allows a
rigorous assessment of the impacts, which can be complementary to the economic analysis, and
provides the necessary elements usually neglected in governmental estimations [9, 10].
Part 1 of this paper [2] critically analyses SDG 12 Sustainable consumption and production and
the related indicators and, in particular, the resource productivity index (R.P.) introduced by the E.U.
[15]. It is the leading indicator toward a European “resource efficiency roadmap”. It evidences that
Material Consumption (MC) is the ratio between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Domestic
Material Consumption. It seems evident that this definition misses essential information that allows for
verifying the environmental footprint. DMC does not consider the resources and the impacts outside
the considered economy [21] (import and export). Hence, it leads the national governments to an
evident underestimation of the impacts that may affect footprint indicators, including material, energy,
and GHGs emissions.
This second part will verify the inconsistency of DMC in estimating the environmental impacts
and discusses a typical example related to globalized production. The example shows how different
production and logistic plans affect the environmental impacts of production. At the same time, DMC
misses any possibility of estimating the indirect effect caused by transport and misses the opportunity
of attributing a measurable value related to the environmental quality of the materials.
The limits in the analysis based on DMC are evident because it is limited to mass balance, and
mass is not a consistent sustainability indicator. On the other hand, exergy analysis can avoid these
limits [22, 23], according to the first part of this paper [2]. Hence, the samples determine how mass
balance can be integrated by energy and exergy, producing a valuable activity of analysis, design and
verification for the measures toward sustainability and reducing the effects of climate change.
Exergy analysis shows that social fluxes and processes (energy conversion systems, industrial
plants, transport systems, etc.) can be analyzed using the second law of thermodynamics [13, 14]. The
second law recognizes the irreversibility of real processes. In particular, it can be observed that
irreversibility depends mainly on the degradation of materials and energy over time. As Wall [1, 8, 9]
and Gaggioli [15] show that there is a scale of energy quality, which can be quantified in terms of
availability analysis (exergy), and this scale can be expressed both intrinsically and economically.
2 Materials and methods
Fig.1 – Schematics of material flow analysis for the city of Vienna (flows in tonnes per capita/year) from
Hendricks et al. [15]
Fig. 1 clearly shows that MFA could be a precious instrument for sustainability analysis because
it presents the schematic representation of the relevant flows that feed the city of Vienna.
According to Wall [1, 23, 24], Fig. 1 has introduced solar radiation and Earth radiation, which
are often not introduced in analogous schemes from sociotechnical engineering. Solar radiation allows
accounting for solar-derived renewable sources, including photovoltaic, thermal, and wind energy,
which would otherwise be excluded. This scheme applies to different scale problems. Otherwise,
information from mass balance is limited and does not give an accurate snapshot of the considered
system’s sustainability and environmental impacts.
2.4 Cumulative exergy consumption and societal metabolism thermodynamics
Szargut [26] and Szargut and Morris [27] have introduced the concept of cumulative exergy
consumption (CExC). The sum of the exergies dissipated inside a process or a physical system is a
fundamental indicator for impact assessment. It describes how a process reduces the quality of the
available resources [28]. CExC includes all the necessary exergies for assessing the quality of energy
demand and includes both the exergy from energy carriers and materials. Bösch [29] has defined
cumulative exergy demand (CExD) as a valuable indicator of exergy and the quality of the
environmental resources extracted to produce a particular product.
Furthermore, CExD quantifies the total depletion of resources and exergy and related
environmental impacts. In particular, it is measured in MJ and is expressed by the following equation:
h ,i ⁄ ( ) (3)
where mi is the mass of material resource i (kg); B(ch),i is the chemical exergy per kg of substance i
(MJ-eq/kg); ej- is the amount of energy from energy carrier j (M.J.); βex/e(k,p,n,r,t),j is exergy factor (or
exergy to energy ratio) of energy carrier j and are reported in Part 1 Table 3. Cumulative exergy
consumption can be referred easily to Fig. 2 and societal metabolism.
3 Results
Fig. 5 - Exergy dissipation by transport in the different cases, calculated from Trancossi [40, 41]
.
Fig. 7 – CO2 emissions in the considered transport cases
The exergy disruption of the two systems has been derived from Tsatsaronis [46], Yilmaz et al.
[47] and Wang et al. [48]. The results are in line with Todorović [45] et al. One-ton marmalade unit
has been considered. In particular, the equations of the system are reported in Table 6.
Table 6 – Equations of the considered system
Liquid Induction
conservation of mass mp=const; ml=const mp=const
conservation of energy ˙ (˙ ) ˙ ˙ ( )
exergy disruption ˙ ˙ (˙ ˙ ) (˙ ˙ ) ˙ (˙ ˙ ) ˙ ( ⁄ ) ˙
exergy efficiency ˙ ⁄[( ˙ ˙ ) (˙ ˙ ) ] (˙ ˙ )⁄ ˙
Fig. 9 – Exergy disruption expressed in terms of exergy input and output of the process
The induction heating process has several advantages against conventional fluid heating by H 20
and HFCs. In particular, it lowers energy and exergy losses for a specific production.
4 Discussion
The different inputs and outputs can be expressed in terms of conservation equations and second
law inequality:
1. Conservation of mass:
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ (4)
where Min are the input masses, Mout are the exiting masses, Mw are the masses of wastes, and Mst are
the masses stocked.
2. Conservation of energy:
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ (5)
(3)
h, ⁄ h ,st ⁄
⏟ ⏟ ⏟ ⏟
5 Conclusions
This paper aims to discuss the thirty-year-old milestone paper by Goran Wall [1], “Exergy
Ecology Democracy - Concepts of a Vital Society or A Proposal for An Exergy Tax”, according to
today's scenario. Wall’s work has been a fundamental step in analyzing relevant environmental
impacts and abuse of resources. Today, it is much more actual in the light of U.N. Sustainable
Development Goals. After analyzing shortly the path toward U.N. SDGs and some inherent
inconsistencies of the currently adopted indicators to measure the progress toward the realization of an
effective transition toward a more sustainable society. This transition requires solving the three
societal dilemmas enunciated by Wall [1]: misuse of physical resources, the environment, and the
abuse of human intelligence.
Despite the increasing mitigation actions, climate change and the continuous growth of the
effects of global heating show the limits and inconsistencies of economically based sustainability
accounting. It evidences the necessity of introducing more objective parameters that can effectively
describe the resources wasted in our society. A helpful parameter is proposed. Exergy describes the
maximum useful work produced by a process, a flux of matter, energy, and any substance in nature.
Dissipating exergy means reducing the potential of Earth to produce useful work and causing a
depletion of available energy [62].
From this consideration, Abu-Rayash and Dincer [63] have proposed adopting exergy analysis
as an effective instrument for accounting for sustainability and understanding and compensating for
the damages that anthropic processes produce to the ecosystem.
The exergy disruption by different processes differing only for production location must be
considered. It relates to water bottles in four different cases. The example has demonstrated that the
amount of exergy dissipated by industrial processes is often much lower than the one related to
transport. In particular, it has been evidenced that the distance between the bottling plants and the final
point of sale is an important cause of unneeded exergy dissipation. In addition, the economic value of
exergy and the possible introduction of an exergy tax are considered substitutes for the existing
economically deleterious taxation system.
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Submitted: 07.09.2022
Revised: 01.10.2022
Accepted: 15.12.2022