Critical Consumption - Energy is widely acknowledged to be one of the largest operating expenses for chemical plants. In fact, total costs are often underestimated. Reported figures usually only include the cost of energy and power purchased or consumed. They typically do not account for the management of energy and the equipment that must be operated and maintained to distribute, use, recover and remove it. If you factor in hydrocarbon feedstocks, costs can sometimes approach 50% of overall operational expenditure. They are also likely to increase further in line with expected energy price rises.

Organizations across the chemicals industry agree that the need to cut environmental emissions is urgent. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2030, demand for energy will increase by 50% compared to today. The increased demand will drive up carbon dioxide emissions and heighten the climate change problem, making the efficient use of energy key to resource conservation.

According to "Breaking the Climate Deadlock, Technology for a Low Carbon Future," a 2009 report produced by The Climate Group and The Office of Tony Blair, to put ourselves on a path to meet our emissions goals, we need to reduce global emissions by 19 gigatons (Gt) in 2020 and energy-related emissions by 48 Gt by 2050. In meeting these targets the potential offered by enhanced energy efficiency across industry alone is significant. The paper indicates that approximately 19% of total savings in energy related emissions to 2050 could come from industry.
With the scale of the problem and industry's contribution defined, it makes sound business sense for industries to optimise their energy consumption.

Adopting The Right Approach

Today's chemicals companies appreciate that there is much that they can do today to sustainably and cost-effectively reduce carbon emissions through the traditional practice of efficient energy management in their plants and assets.
If they adopt the right approach, chemical companies can reduce operational expenses, drive bottom-line improvements and increase business performance. This is particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, which continues to be challenging. With profitability levels still low, there is a shortage of money available for capital projects. Businesses will want to push assets to energy efficiency limits in order to reduce operating costs before considering investment - so they will need to focus on ensuring optimal energy performance.

Of course, the way in which organizations interpret energy management varies. Typically, the key challenge will be to identify the combination of improvements that best meets the demands of the existing production processes and utility systems and maximizes potential in line with business objectives.

An integrated and holistic approach to energy performance management can achieve significant savings in energy costs and hence greenhouse gas emissions both within the manufacturing units and in the utilities systems that support the manufacturing units.
An important component of the solution is provided by model-based energy management systems, such as those produced by AspenTech. These can be used to help take advantage of potential savings, which have hitherto been largely unexploited in addition to providing optimized and consistent information about a site's key processes and facilities for decision-makers.
This knowledge can be useful both in long-term, strategic decisions and in concluding energy supply contracts, in preparing budgets and in drawing up investment plans, as well as in optimizing the energy costs of ongoing operations - based on current demand, costs and plant availability.

Sustainable Benefits

The potential benefits to businesses of this kind of holistic approach to energy management are huge. Adopting best practice here can have a major bottom-line benefit since savings of between 5-10% can be obtained using operations planning and optimization without needing to make any significant capital investment even in the most sophisticated plants.

By implementing an energy management program with elements focusing on both supply and demand, organizations can achieve significant returns - often over 15% of their annual energy costs with very attractive payback on the capital invested. So, the best practice is to develop a sustainable approach, involving the continuous monitoring of operations and focusing on making improvements to the implementation.
For chemicals companies, the ability to see how they are doing against a plan, a contract or a budget is all part of being able to improve the energy side of the business. As energy becomes a constant metric for operational performance for the organization, users will begin to see sustainable and continuous process improvements.