Pintaric Z., Varbanov P., Klemeš J., Kravanja Z., 2015, Evaluating the Economic Efficiency of the Technologies for Greenhouse Gas Footprint Reduction, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 45, 535-540.
Several conflicting objectives, like economic benefits and environmental impacts, has to be taken into account when evaluating the footprint reduction technologies. These problems are often dealt with by multi-objective optimization yielding a set of the Pareto non-dominated solutions. Although the Pareto curves provide useful information, deeper insights are needed for investment decision-making in order to establish suitable relationships between lost economic efficiency and improved environmental performance. This contribution presents the methods for the economic evaluations of the technologies for greenhouse gas footprint reduction within the Pareto region. Based on the incremental analysis, a new combined economic/environmental measure, called a ‘Marginal Footprint’ is defined. As long as its value remains higher than one or lower than minus one for those economic criteria to be maximized or minimized, the savings originating from footprint reduction would be larger than the loss of the economic potential. This sub-interval of the Pareto region could be regarded ‘as low footprint as reasonably practicable’. The incremental variation of the economic potential for reducing one footprint unit is determined, and compared to the reference values in order to determine a priority ranking of a particular technology to be applied for greenhouse gas footprint reduction.
