Rightsizing equipment saves costs and cuts carbon emissions

Most industrial assets tend to be oversized for a range of reasons, such as building in safety margins or allowing processes to cope with peaks in demand. The extent to which this oversizing is useful varies greatly from one industrial enterprise to another.

 While there are no hard-and-fast rules about the level of energy and emissions reductions that can be achieved through right-sizing equipment, the improvements can be significant. In one published example, a company was able to remove an entire packaging line, saving $1 million a year.

In the Case for Industrial Energy Efficiency, the Energy Efficiency Movement has been showing how 10 simple actions can help industrial energy users to reduce costs and carbon emissions. This insight is based on an original from the Energy Efficiency Mover Flowserve and highlights action 2: Rightsizing industrial assets and processes.

The issue         

Iron and steel production consumes more coal than any other sector, and is the most greenhouse gas intensive industry on the planet. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) , the sector’s carbon emissions must drop significantly to meet climate targets.

This means it is important to seek any possible means of improving energy efficiency. And while most of the sector’s emissions are down to the use of coal for blast furnace heating, there are also many other parts of a steelworks that contribute to its energy use.

Several of these are linked to pumping water, for example for roll cooling, flume flushing, furnace feeds, cross spraying and in scrubber systems. Flow systems are often overlooked in industrial energy efficiency programs but can yield important gains when assessed by experts.

The approach

A UK-based steelworks took advantage of an energy efficiency program run by the flow control specialist Flowserve, looking to find ways to maximize pump system uptimes and mean time between repairs, while cutting energy and maintenance costs.

Engineers from Flowserve’s Energy Advantage Program used distributed control data, in-situ performance testing and system walk-downs to assess the real needs of various pumping services—and compare them to what the steelmaker’s systems were drawing in practice.

The results

Armed with a holistic view of system requirements, the engineers uncovered sub-optimal thermal balances, excess throttling and off-design operations that opened the door for several design, operations and maintenance improvements.

This information helped the steelworks match its pumping system assets and operations to its actual requirements, saving 7.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year—worth around $520,000—and cutting annual carbon emissions by 4,320 metric tonnes.