In 2012, approximately 3700 million tons of cement is produced all around the world. Iran by producing 65 million tons cement in 2012 is ranked in fifth. Production process of the cement requires a huge amount of energy and it is approximated that 25% to 35% (based on efficiency of factories) of total costs in cement industries belong to required heat energy in production process. To produce 65 million tons of cement in Iran, about 56×1012 kcal of heat energy is consumed. Thus applying the new and cheep sources of energy could play an important role in reducing energy costs. On the other hand one of the important environmental problems is the absolutely huge amount of used tire of vehicles and the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and they should be appropriately destroyed. As a result they can easily change to Tire-Derived Fuel (TDF) and Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF) to provide the required heat energy in cement industries.
In this study the available amount of RDF and TDF for cement industry are estimated. The evaluation results show that in Iran TDF can only provide about 1.77 percent of this need. Also using RDF, whose production has large potential in Iran, can cover about 27.96 percent. It is concluded that reduction of 29.73 percent of fossil fuel consumption in cement industries stem from applying both of these fuels simultaneously, leading to gas saving about two billion cubic meters per year. It is determined that the export value of such volume of gas is equal to one billion and ten million dollars with current gas price. However there is no tendency for using the alternative energy by cement factories because of low price of oil and natural gas inside Iran than global rate. In fact at the moment applying RDF and TDF doesn’t have any benefit for cement factories.
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of using alternative fuels in the cement industry in Iran and to show that for persuading and encouraging the cement factories to apply RDF and TDF, instead of increasing the energy prices, the revenue from fuel savings in global rate should be paid directly to cement industries.
