Multiple criteria evaluation of current energy resources for Turkish manufacturing industry Semih O ¨ nu ¨t * , Umut Rıfat Tuzkaya, Narthan Saadet Department of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Faculty, Yildiz Technical University, 34349 Istanbul, Turkey Received 11 September 2006; received in revised form 11 May 2007; accepted 22 December 2007 Available online 4 March 2008 Abstract Energy is the main component of natural resources of developing, as well as developed, countries like Turkey. Because of economic and social developments, the demand for energy, in general, has increased considerably in Turkey. Since Turkey is not an oil or natural gas (NG) producing country, the energy resource usage for energy consumption should be effective. The Turkish industrial sector com- prises approximately 36% of Turkey’s primary energy consumption, and the manufacturing industry is the largest industrial sector. In this study, the focus was on the manufacturing industry as the major energy consuming sector in Turkey, and it was analyzed in terms of efficient use of energy resources. The most widely used energy resources in the Turkish manufacturing industry, namely fuel-oil, coal, electricity, LPG and NG were taken into account. Evaluation and selection of current energy resources in this selected industry can be viewed as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, including human judgments, tangible and intangible criteria and priorities and trade offs between goals and criteria. The analytic network process (ANP), one of the MCDM methods, was used to eval- uate the most suitable energy resources for the manufacturing industry in this study. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Energy resources; Turkish manufacturing industry; Analytic network process 1. Introduction During the period 1980–2000, the rapid industrializa- tion and urbanization in Turkey were accompanied by large energy needs in the different sectors. The four major energy consuming sectors, namely industrial, resi- dential, transportation and agriculture are diverse and large. Industry is the single largest energy user in Turkey. In 2001, 36.6% of Turkey’s primary energy consumption occurred in the industrial sector, 34.5% in the residential sector, 20.9% in the transportation sector, 5.1% in the agricultural sector and 2.9% in other sectors [1–3]. Like- wise, Turkey’s electricity consumption occurred mainly in the industrial sector by 52%. The share of the industrial sector in total consumption is expected to grow at approximately 9% per year [4]. Hence, as Turkey advances in the course of industrialization, the consump- tion of oil and natural gas (NG) are expected to increase as the main imported electricity producing resources. It can be seen from the above argument that it is very important to use energy resources effectively, especially in the industrial sector, the major energy consumer. The Turkish industrial sector consists of a variety of manufacturing and conversion activities. These include coal and lignite mining, other mining industries, building and public works, manufacturing industry, communica- tion industry, etc. [5]. The manufacturing industry, being the largest industrial sector in Turkey, was taken as the main energy consumption area in this study. The State Statistics Institute of Turkey (SSI) has broken down the manufacturing industry sector into the following sub- sector industries: food processing, beverage and tobacco, textiles, apparel and leather industries, wood processing and manufacturing of wooden products including furni- ture, manufacturing of paper and paper products, print- 0196-8904/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.enconman.2007.12.026 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 212 2597070x2823. E-mail address: onut@yildiz.edu.tr (S. O ¨ nu ¨t). www.elsevier.com/locate/enconman Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Energy Conversion and Management 49 (2008) 1480–1492