Emerson Process Management has announced the Smart Energy Initiative, a global programme designed to combine its unmatched industrial energy expertise with advanced energy management technologies. It will enable customers to leverage more renewable fuels, lower energy costs and reduce emissions.
The author: Günter Eckhardt Editor in Chief, cpp chemical plants & processes
Emerson is focused on an estimated 1.45 billion euro market that is poised for strong growth as refineries, manufacturers and other industrial customers face increased pressure to adopt lower-cost fuels. With energy accounting for 30 % or more of a facility’s overall operating costs – and simultaneous higher prices for fossil fuels and new global emissions mandates – industrial customers are increasingly looking to waste fuels, biomass and other renewable sources as a solution to these challenges. Emerson’s new Industrial Energy Group will specifically concentrate on modernising and improving the performance of powerhouses, the onsite utilities that provide steam and electricity to power industrial operations, while also improving how the manufacturing process consumes energy. “With industrial manufacturers consuming an estimated 50 % of the world’s energy, a situation that is aggravated by rising fossil fuel prices and global mandates for reduced emissions, our customers need more than incremental efficiencies in energy management”, said Bob T. Sharp, President of Emerson Process Management. “With our Smart Energy Initiative, Emerson is introducing a fundamentally new platform that can change energy economics globally.”
Calculating the actual caloric values
At the heart of Emerson’s integrated technology platform is its “True Energy” technology, a patent-pending innovation for calculating the actual calorific values of fuel sources which makes reliable energy production predictable and repeatable. “Our True Energy Combustion Control platform redefines the current model of combustion management, which has been around since the 1920s and is still in practice today”, said Chip Rennie, Director of Industrial Energy at Emerson. “This is means nothing short of reinventing combustion models, which will make the prevalent use of low-cost fuels like biomass achievable and sustainable.”
Emerson’s proprietary suite of software, combined with field control technologies, enables powerhouses to interchangeably use the most available and affordable renewable or waste fuels – wood waste, food by-products, animal waste or manufacturing by-products like petroleum coke or off-gases – to consistently create steam to power their operations. It also delivers twenty-first century combustion solu-tions for greater efficiency and reliability when using waste and other renewable fuels, which burn and deliver energy at variable and unpredictable rates.
Reduced emissions at Tata Steel
Modernising industrial powerhouses for greater sustainability not only cuts energy costs but also helps companies reduce emissions and meet global regulatory mandates. The European Renewable Energy Directive 20/20/20 seeks to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 20 % and increase the share of renewable fuels in the European Union’s energy mix by 20 % by the year 2020. Tata Steel’s Port Talbot facility in Wales, for example, has upgraded control of its largest steam boiler using energy management technologies and services from Emerson Process Management. The new controls enable Tata to increase energy efficiency and maximise waste fuel usage, thus reducing emissions as well as reliance on purchased fuels.
The Port Talbot facility is Britain’s largest integrated steel mill, making over 4.5 million t/a of high-quality sheet steel for the automotive, construction and household appliance markets. It includes two blast furnaces and a basic oxygen furnace as well as continuous casters and a strip rolling mill. To date, Emerson has upgraded controls on three of the site’s seven steam boilers. “The boiler upgrades are helping us make better use of ‘indigenous’ waste fuels – such as blast furnace, BOS (basic oxygen steelmaking) and coke oven gas – that are by-products of our manufacturing process”, said Andrew Rees, manager of the Tata Steel upgrade project. “The improved controls are part of a comprehensive energy management project that is expected to bring down powerhouse energy consumption by between three and five per cent and help Tata Steel achieve its vision of becoming energy self-sufficient.”
Monitoring critical components
Steam production is a significant operating expense for processing plants, and about 20 % of the steam leaving a boiler is typically lost through failing steam traps. The Rosemount 708 wireless acoustic transmitter, part of the “Smart Energy Initiative“, provides accurate measurement and constant visibility to steam traps without the effort for a manual inspection, enabling dramatic decreases in steam trap failures and fuel cost reductions of 10 to 20 % each year.
Pressure relief valves are another critical component of a plant. Manual monitoring for releases at pressure relief valves occurs periodically and does not indicate when or why a release occurred, increasing the chances of a safety, regulatory or environmental incident. The Rosemount 708 wireless acoustic transmitter provides visibility to pressure relief valves by alerting operators when a valve has opened in as little as a single second. The time-stamped alerts can be compared to process conditions or environmental reporting to help identify the root cause of a release, so that preventive actions can be taken to reduce future emissions. This system allows monitoring throughout the plant, even in remote and hard-to-reach locations, with greater than 99 % data reliability.
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