By MARTIN FACKLER

KUMAGAYA, Japan - With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyor belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.
Engineers from China and elsewhere in Asia come to study its design, which has allowed the company to cut the amount of power it buys from the electrical grid.
The plant is just one example of Japan’s dedication to reducing energy use, a commitment that dates back to the oil shocks of the 1970s that shook this resource-poor nation.
Now, the country is hoping to use its conservation record to take a rare leadership role on a pressing global issue. It showcased its efforts to export its conservation ethic - and its expensive power-saving technology - at the meeting in Japan of the Group of 8 industrial leaders in early July.
“Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste give Japan the world’s most energy-efficient structure,” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in a speech . Japan “wants to contribute to the world,” he said.
Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum.
“Japan taught itself decades ago how to compete with gasoline at $4 per gallon,” said Hisakazu Tsujimoto of the Energy Conservation Center, a government research institute that promotes energy efficiency. “It will fare better than other countries in the new era of high energy costs.”
According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar’s worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India, in 2005.
Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the boom years of the 1970s and ‘80s.
From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation.
The results are visible at the Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay, run by Japan’s No. 2 steelmaker, JFE Steel. Massive steel ducts run from the blast furnaces and surrounding buildings. These capture heat and gases that had previously been released into the air or burned off as waste. Now, they are used to power generators that produce 90 percent of the plant’s electricity. (The plant’s main fuel remains the coal used to heat its huge blast furnaces.)
Such innovations allow the mill to produce a ton of steel using 35 percent less energy than it did three decades ago, said Yoshitsugu Iino, group leader of JFE Steel’s climate change policy group.
Now, Mr. Fukuda has proposed what is called a sector-based approach to new goals for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This means setting the same numerical goals for all companies in an industry, regardless of location.
The sector approach has been embraced by Japanese industry groups, which say their high levels of efficiency should become the global standards. This would also give Japanese companies more opportunities to sell their energy-saving technologies .
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. The generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders increased three years ago, after energy prices began rising. Since then, the company has sold 64 units .
“Japan rushed to embrace these technologies back in the 1980s,” said Katsushi Sorida, head of the waste heat plant department at Kawasaki Plant Systems, a subsidiary that markets and installs the units. “Now the rest of the world is finally catching up.