Hydrogen
� � Giorgio Minestrini, dissemination manager, and Ernesto Cattaneo, coordinator of the LIFE SUGAR project, inside Stara Glass offices.
The idea of a Total Recovery Glass Furnace and the LIFE SUGAR Project Ernesto Cattaneo* discusses a consortium which aims to launch a glass manufacturing furnace that can decrease energy and NOX emissions of a regenerative furnace. fuel efficiency of electrical energy production is 45%. Regenerative furnaces, can easily have a 65% fuel efficiency. Therefore, in the countries where energy production is not mostly renewable, glass furnace electrification causes a world increase of CO2, not a decrease. � Alternative fuels: they make sense when all the process is sustainable. Hydrogen is indeed interesting, since is does not contain carbon, but nowadays 95% of the hydrogen in the world is produced by steam reforming, it is therefore grey and very far from carbon neutrality. � Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS): it does not seem to be applicable everywhere, and anyway, as said, we need to deal with 10.000.000.000kg/year of CO2. � Efficiency increase: even if regenerative furnace chambers have a
tremendous temperature efficiency, in fact they heat air up to 1300°C with a flow of 1500°C waste gas, still about 30% of the burned fuel is wasted with the 500600°C fumes. This direction for carbon containment is indeed the most virtuous one, because it involves all others as a cascade. Stara Glass, as a furnace design company, has always aimed at utilising the residual waste gas heat that, depending on the furnace size, might even be 2MW. The idea is to cool down the waste gas up to the coldest level allowed by the filter, which is commonly about 200°C for bag filters, and reintegrate in the process the saved thermal power. Stara Glass, with its Centauro technology (Fig 1), has already been able Continued>>
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E
uropean Union aims for carbon neutrality by 2050. This ambitious and well due goal has put the glass industry under an unprecedented negative spotlight. We used to be thought about for the total recyclability of our products, or for their unmatchable chemical inertia. Now the glass industry means a ratio 3.5:1 between glass and CO2 production. In fact, Europe produces 35 Mtonne/ year of glass and 10 Mton/year of CO2 for its melting. If some glass researchers had had a magic trick in the sleeve to solve the CO2 issue, at this point it would have already come out. But it did not, so it appears we will have to start paving all the hard roads in front of us, and analyse all possible contributions to CO2 containment, one by one: � Electrification: in Italy, the average
33 Glass International July/August 2021
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