Energy-Use Rights Trading for Low-Carbon Industrial Process Systems: A Review of Pollution Reduction and Efficiency Gains

Industrial process systems must reduce energy use and carbon emissions while maintaining productivity under binding constraints. Energy-use rights trading (EURT), also referred to as energy-consuming rights trading, energy quota trading, or energy-consumption permit trading, converts administrative energy-consumption control into tradable entitlements. This narrative and integrative review uses a transparent search-and-screening audit and reframes EURT primarily through the Chinese pilot experience, while using international energy-efficiency certificate and obligation schemes as comparative context. The review examines how quota scarcity, quota prices, monitoring, reporting and verification, trading liquidity and policy coordination may influence process-level energy management, production scheduling, heat integration, waste-heat recovery, equipment renewal, fuel substitution, electrification, digital monitoring and low-carbon retrofit decisions. It compares EURT with carbon-emissions trading, pollution-permit trading, white-certificate or energy-efficiency-obligation schemes, water-rights trading and renewable-energy certificates. Evidence suggests that EURT can support pollution reduction, carbon mitigation, and green productivity improvement when quota scarcity is binding, markets are liquid, monitoring is reliable, and policy coordination is credible, but findings remain heterogeneous and vulnerable to contamination from overlapping policies. A stylized process-system illustration shows how quota prices can alter the ranking of retrofit investments. Future research should integrate transaction records, equipment-level energy data, process simulation and multi-policy identification strategies.