(19a) Digitalization’s Role for Optimizing Sustainability

Operating our current assets in the most sustainable way possible is critical. Societal concerns, government regulations, investor activism, and customer demands must be addressed with real action. While bold statements and aggressive targets may be sufficient in the short term, specific action steps to drive progress is necessary.

Achieving zero emissions or a net zero carbon foot print is not easy. The technology and infrastructure to do this profitably does not exist currently. Any profitability expectations would be based on speculative assumptions of advances in technology and infrastructure as a result of universally applied government regulation across industry sectors that change the competitive landscape and profitability profile. Designing, constructing, and starting a refinery or petrochemical plant to operate in this manner would take 6 to 8 years and then need expectations of running for 20 or 30 years as a minimum. So a high level of investment would be required now to achieve the required reduction a decade from now. Certainly available options (i.e. feedstock changes, green/blue hydrogen or green electricity for heat, CCUS, and others) should be considered and prices understood so that investment can be made when confidence in profitability can be established.

In the interim however, we can commit to operating our existing assets in the most efficient manner possible. As chemical engineers we are trained to optimize production by addressing efficiency, throughput, yield and availability. Digitalization provides the opportunity to utilize this knowledge and domain expertise in a manner that presents a view of operations where baselines are established, tradeoffs between energy efficiency and production are understood, and emissions can be minimized. Measurement and awareness are the first steps to achieving operational excellence in these areas.

Digitalization provides measurement, understanding and insight so that actions can be taken to improve sustainability. Complete heat and material balances around the facility can be included in a visual manner to show operational performance for emissions, energy efficiency, and production. Live steam balance can be presented to show utility tradeoffs possible. The real time operational tradeoffs can be presented to operations for tuning per the plant’s needs.

This can be extended to the strategic decisions at an engineering and management level where operational strategy for running a plant change as prices change. Pinch analysis opportunity identification for the heat exchanger network will vary as the tradeoff between capital expenditure and energy costs vary. Thresholds and investment profitability will change as cost profiles change. The profitability of changing feedstocks and substituting hydrogen for fuel gas will change as market conditions and regulation is implemented. Being prepared and understanding the opportunity can be included as part of the digitalization solution.

Case examples of digitalization being applied to enhance decision making on a real time basis to understand current operations, opportunity for improvement, and recommended steps needed to be taken will be reviewed.