I've been interested in this lately. Hopefully you have seen this?
Golan, Jonathan S.(IL-HAIF)
Semirings for the ring theorist.
Rev. Roumaine Math. Pures Appl. 35 (1990), no. 6, 531–540.
Golan cautions that treating semirings as 'poor man's rings' is not always good. They can really be different animals altogether. I think someone noted above that the semiring of ideals is additively idempotent. In a sense, this is as far as you can get from an additive group.
The compensation for the loss of the additive group is the complete lattice structure compatible with the multiplication. That is, if A\leq B, then AC\leq BC and CA\leq CB.
Ring theorists have been saying things about rings via the lattice of one sided ideals for years! The lattices of onesided ideals are almost as nice, except you lose compatibility of multiplication with the order, and there is no longer a twosided identity for the semiring. These are called quantales in some places.
