ACHIEVING NET-ZERO IN HEAVY INDUSTRY

A SUSTAINABILITY LEADER’S GUIDE

Sustainability is the defining challenge of our time. Not a year goes by without seeing a horrifying new headline, be it soaring temperatures, deforestation, wildfires or the increasing frequency of floods. The climate emergency requires urgent action not just from individuals and governments, but from businesses, too.

Yet, while organisations of all sizes and from diverse sectors understand it’s a critical issue, they don’t always know how to bring about significant change – particularly in energy intensive processes. An encouraging trend is the boom in sustainability leadership roles appearing across more and more businesses. In the UK alone, sustainability job listings have increased by 91% since 2016.

Sustainability practitioners – especially those in heavy industries – understand the scale of the task ahead better than most, so they will naturally be at the heart of any effective decarbonisation journey. As more organisations hire and challenge their own leaders in sustainability to drive this change forward, the closer we will get to taking control of the climate crisis.

But while sustainability leaders will be at the very forefront of making the vision for net-zero a reality across their organisations, they also face increasing pressure to get results quickly and highlight progress towards their goals – especially as 93% of businesses will reportedly miss their sustainability targets unless they double the pace of decarbonisation. They must make sure their voices are heard, that they have the right partners, and can access the right data to demonstrate their impact.

The Challenge For Industry

Despite sustainability rising rapidly up the agenda of both heavy industries and less energy-intensive sectors, the challenge is daunting and in some cases will require efforts to develop new materials and new processes and bring them to scale quickly.

It’s not simply a case of switching energy production to renewable sources. In some industries, such as chemicals or pharmaceuticals, energy demand is so high that such a switch is not easily made, and many of these processes are perceived to be locked into fossil fuels. Others may not be able to easily access renewables infrastructure yet.

There are options available to decarbonise some processes, including electrification of heat, carbon capture, and zero-carbon material conversion processes. But investment in energy efficiency continues to have an important role to play. Sustainability begins with the fuel that isn’t used – and when high-energy parts of infrastructure, such as steam systems, are well controlled and managed, the energy reductions can be dramatic.

That’s why for most businesses, the pathway to achieving their sustainability goals involves working across the greenhouse gas management hierarchy to avoid unnecessary emissions, reduce through efficiency and optimisation, substitute though onsite renewables generation or quality renewable energy contracts such as Power Purchase Agreements, and ultimately to compensate for unavoidable residual emissions. These must now be seen as complimentary processes.

Influence At The Top

As sustainability practitioners know, they can – and must – influence the C-suite investment decisions that will lead to the most substantial emission reductions. While this might be a harder process and conversation in some industries than others, the task remains no less important.

The good thing is that buying conversations are evolving to include a wider range of voices. New budget-holders are appearing across organisations and sustainability leaders are increasingly finding themselves in this new class of crucial decision-makers. As such, they are increasingly better positioned to highlight new ways of working, new partners and new technologies to their boards.

While factors such as thermal processes and energy use requirements might once have been the remit of the Chief Operations Officer or the Head of Engineering, sustainability leaders are now well placed to influence the important decisions that could cut emissions. They can also consider decisions from a different angle, taking a more holistic view of the impact of investment. And this is only set to continue, with a recent survey by EY highlighting that more than 60% of sustainability executives expect to spend more in 2023 to address climate change than they did this year, showing their increasing impact as budget-holders.

Partners In Progress In Decarbonising Heat

The scale of the challenge for sustainability leaders cannot be overstated. But that doesn’t mean they need to implement these changes alone. Businesses need a considered, tailored approach that suits their individual needs and sustainability goals. For heavy industries with high-energy consumption and significant thermal requirements, any solution needs to be bespoke to their specific system infrastructure, industry, needs and energy use. Every heating system is built from different components, and is of varying ages and efficiency levels – meaning decarbonisation is not a one-size-fits all process.

For many industrial manufacturers, heating systems that involve steam are essential to their processes and simply cannot be taken out. That’s why sustainability leaders need to partner with experts who can optimise their systems and reduce carbon impact, as well as guide them towards options for decarbonising their processes, while retaining most of their existing steam infrastructure and keeping disruption to a minimum.

DATA-DRIVEN IMPACT

Advances in digital technologies are enabling industrial plants to be monitored more closely than ever before and provide better visibility of asset performance, providing sustainability leaders with crucial intelligence to drive efficiency.

Thermal partners can extract information from all parts of a plant and then create reports that detail actionable insights and help sustainability practitioners track progress for their organisations. Indeed, without this data, opportunities will be missed and changes might look insignificant or go unnoticed, resulting in less budget and buyin from the top. The key to this insight is data. IBM’s research points out that a lack of data insights on progress is a top challenge for 44% of senior leaders when it comes to achieving their sustainability targets.

But once a business unlocks that data, it can understand exactly how efficiently a facility is running– and make steps towards significant carbon reductions. Establishing this holistic view allows a business to determine which parts of the system are running well and which parts are performing sub-optimally, and therefore hindering the facility’s overall efficiency and – ultimately – sustainability.

With a more intelligence-driven approach in place, it will become easier to integrate emerging technologies such as AI and ML, which are becoming increasingly available and more sophisticated. There is a real opportunity to integrate these into the facility’s ecosystem to enable predictive maintenance, adapt energy usage based on varying requirements across the plant, and automate monitoring and reporting.

Optimisation In Action

To take an example of data driven efficiency gains, we can look to a recent project that Spirax Sarco completed at a US-based chemical plant that produces basic chemicals, intermediates and resins. The plant experi- enced a steam system water hammer incident that resulted in a safety hazard, incurred high repair costs, and lost production.

Our experts then conducted a plant-wide survey of the site and found that 10% of the steam traps were ‘failed open’, while a further 34% of drip traps were ‘failed closed’, meaning that steam passed through traps without providing its full potential while using additional boiler fuel – driving up operational costs and resulting in unnecessary emissions. Our team was able to pinpoint the failed drip traps to the crucial issues of energy, safety and reliability and provide optimisation recommendations for plant management.

The optimised steam traps went on to provide an annual energy saving of $570,000 within a year, heightened productivity, and crucially, reduced the plant’s carbon footprint by nearly 5,000 tons a year. Numbers like these are exactly what sustainability leaders can deliver to their boardrooms, alongside cleaner and more productive plants.

Tackling The Carbon Footprint Of The Heavy Industries

Decarbonisation is a significant long-term challenge that will shape industry for decades to come. There’s no doubt of the scale of the task at hand, nor the stakes. Be it pharma, manufacturing, chemicals or any other heavy industry, the time to act is now.

The encouraging thing is that the tools and innovations sustainability leaders need to not only implement initiatives, but also monitor and measure their energy systems more closely, are evolving all the time with many ready to be deployed now. By finding a trusted partner and ensuring a system that is digitally-connected, insight-driven and most importantly, efficient, sustainability leaders can bring their organisations ever closer to net-zero.