U.S. Energy Information Administration Independent Statistics & Analysis www.eia.gov

AEO2017 Industrial Working Group meeting 1: 

preview of updates

Industrial Working Group 

Industrial Team: Kelly Perl, Team Leader; Peter Gross, Susan Hicks, Paul Otis, & Matt 

Skelton

August 16, 2016| Washington, DC

Preliminary Results. Do not Disseminate.
Macro-Industrial Working Group has split in two!

• Macro working group had meeting July 28; materials available on 

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/workinggroup/macroindustrial/

• Industrial working group will have two meetings this year 

– Second date: September 22, 2016: 1:30-3:00 in 2E-081 or by webex

Industrial Working Group Meeting #1 

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AEO2017 will be a light AEO – few model improvements

• Extend model to 2050 (defaulted for IDM)

• Cleanup and added features on technology choice models (defaulted, 

tweaks needed)

• Individual industry benchmark improvements (waiting for default)

• Usual updates

– Macro, history & benchmarking

– Laws and regulations unchanged since AEO2016

• Limited side cases: high/low macro and high/low oil price

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Technology choice industry cleanup & added features

• Apply lessons learned in iron & steel and paper to cement & lime, aluminum, 

and glass

– MECS benchmarking

– Dynamic regional representation

– Generic code for common steps, aiding maintenance & succession

• Allow more direct control over technologies through an obsolescence 

parameter

– Will stop adding technologies after obsolescence year is set

– Can use to force more continuous processing, more electric arc furnaces

• Cool input and output files!

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Technology choice cleanup: direct reduced iron (DRI)

• Need to make some changes from AEO2016 

– We were too optimistic on the amount of DRI output 

– We were too pessimistic about the percentage of DRI input an electric arc furnace (EAF) can 

use

• Changes straightforward

– Lower DRI in near term to reflect output of Nucor and voestalpine plants in 2016

– Increase percentage of DRI that EAFs can use from 5% to ~50%

– No longer require that at least 50% of DRI output needs to be used in basic oxygen furnaces 

(BOF) – will drop that to 5% or less

– DRI additions will be exogenous and discontinuous, but timing can be altered easily

– What kind of scrap market modeling is necessary to make DRI additions endogenous? 

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Updates & Benchmarking

• Macro update

• Improvements in Individual industry benchmarking

• As always, bench to regions (SEDS), history (Monthly Energy Review) and 

short term energy (STEO)

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Industrial meeting materials will be posted 

in about a month; macro is already posted. 

Link:

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/workinggroup/macroindustrial/

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Industrial Working Group Meeting #1 

Washington, DC | August 16, 2016
Thank you for your attention!

Industrial Team: EIA-OECEAIndustrialTeam@eia.gov

Kelly Perl (202) 586-1743

Peter Gross (202) 586-8822

Susan Hicks (202) 586-4388

Paul Otis (202) 586-2306

Matthew Skelton (202) 287-5660

Industrial Working Group Meeting #1 

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