Qatar Chemical (Q-Chem)’s Hasna A Sidahmed teamed up with Emerson’s Harish Govindan and Janka O’Brien to present Sustainability and Energy Optimization Study at the 2024 Emerson Exchange Conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. Here is their presentation abstract.
Processes, tools, and methodologies are needed to create a realistic plan to achieve the required goals when the plant is challenged to come up with sustainability projects. Emerson becomes the partner for Chemical Industry helping to identify and develop a Sustainability plan.
Q-Chem, like many in the chemical industry, had challenges in driving their sustainability path forward. Challenges included:
- Difficulty measuring current Scope 1 and 2 emissions accurately.
- Limited systems and processes to track and account for emissions generate & energy consumed and demonstrate progress.
- Lack of visibility to site emissions & energy consumption and the impact that decisions have on them.
- Where to get green electricity?
- Next step-change in emissions reduction & energy optimization will take significant capital investment.
- Inadequate technologies with uncertain future.
They saw opportunities for optimizing energy consumption, reducing emissions, and reducing flaring events. Deliverables for the sustainability plane included a high-level report with identification of strategic and tactical opportunities, a cost savings/benefits analysis along with potential implementation costs (+/-30%), an implementation roadmap (1, 3, 5 and 10 years), assessment outcomes, and a list of opportunities with a commercial model.
The execution strategy included first discovery and assessment of the current state, followed by an analysis phase, study report, and an establishment of the path forward.
The roadmap priorities included:
The Aspen Fidelis software application was used for a model-driven energy and emissions study with participation and knowledge transfer from diverse functional groups in Q-Chem. Aspen Fidelis was selected due to the short time span of the business and its capabilities to model the whole business. It modeled the flows through the business. Events were added including reliability failures, turnarounds, and other operational events to develop a baseline case if nothing were done. The project team ran Monte Carlo-based simulations based on different projects being done to see what the impact of the project from a sustainability and financial performance perspective was.
Deliverables from the model included marginal abatement cost curves, a 10-year sustainability roadmap, and impact the sustainability-related projects would deliver.
The study helped identify forty-five sustainability project opportunities, twelve which could quick wins and first to execute, fourteen medium-term projects, and nineteen long-term projects, greater than 5-year project opportunities. The project team developed PowerBI dashboard to track projects including investments and economic and financial results to date. And example of one of the energy & climate action KPIs included energy intensity, dollars/ton of production, dynamic energy targets, reduced energy lose and emissions release instances, and bad actor identification. Each opportunity reflected an individual dashboard.
