Chemical industry consumes approximately 20% of total industrial energy consumption, and contributes in similar proportions to greenhouse gas emissions. Considering also the financial pressure resulting from the rising energy prices, energy efficiency is an important issue for the chemical producers. In its environmental policy, the company should give clear and unambiguous statements and define concrete programmes aiming at reducing the environmental load. Moreover, a company that analyses systematically the life cycle of its products has a better credibility than its competitors having an indifferent attitude. The model developed in previous research was used to predict the energy consumption of different production scenarios. The principle of this model was energy balance of each particular unit operation involved in the production process. Then, the overall energy consumption is acquired by summation of the individual consumptions. This approach allows us to analyze the unit operations and optimize their energy efficiency. We found out that for particular unit operations the saving of energy utility consumption can be as high as 40%. Assuming heterogeneous energy utility mix (i.e energy utilities from different sources), optimization of the overall plant energy efficiency can be considered as multiobjective optimization taking into account the financial and environmental effects. To quantify the environmental burden, we tested several indicators (Cumulative Energy Demand (CED); Ecoindicator 99 (ECO'99); the method of Ecological Scarcity (UBP'97); EDIP'97 – Environmental Design of Industrial Products (Version 1997); Impact 2002+; IPCC 2001 100a (climate change for 100 years time horizon)).

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