KETs Impact: Optimising Resource Efficiency in Process Plants

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The recent SusChem White paper ‘Impact: Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) in Horizon Europe’ included a number of success stories highlighting publicly funded innovation involving KETs and the SusChem Newsroom is featuring a selection of these fruitful 'SusChem inspired' initiatives.

KETs are technologies selected for their ability to address global challenges, support the development of new products, and stimulate economic growth.

Sustainable chemistry is essential to the technological advance of KETs including advanced materials, advanced manufacturing technologies, industrial biotechnology, micro and nanoelectronics, nanotechnology and photonics. SusChem's key enabling technologies provide the critical building blocks for the solutions needed to achieve a sustainable low carbon circular economy. You can find out more here.

Our seventh success story looks at the FP7 project MORE that sought to monitor resource efficiency during daily operations of large production plants to influence operational decisions and ensure that plant efficiency is optimised and environmental footprint is constantly minimised.

MORE – Real-time Monitoring and Optimisation of Resource Efficiency in Integrated Processing Plants 

Real-time data and online decision support systems enable IMPACT

MORE has brought the computation, visualisation and use of resource efficiency indicators to a new level by evaluating them online in daily operations, visualising them for operators and managers in a transparent fashion and using them in decision support and optimisation

 

MORE was a STREP (Small and medium scale focused research project) supported by the European Commission in the field of Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies (NMP) aiming at identifying resource efficiency indicators (REIs) that can support operational decisions in processing plants through the use of real-time data and the implementation of dedicated online decision support systems. MORE ran from November 2013 to February 2017.

How was the breakthrough innovation achieved? 

Within MORE, the academic and research partners Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain and VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, the solutions providers LeiKon GmbH and S•PACT GmbH, Germany, the industrial partners PETROLEOS DEL NORTE SA (Petronor), Spain, BASF Personal Care and Nutrition GmbHINEOS Köln GmbH, Germany and LENZING AG, Austria as well as the coordinating consultant inno TSD, France collaborated impressively to develop theoretical results, implement them in practice, publish and standardise them. 

Impact

As key results MORE defined principles for the definition of real-time Resource Efficiency Indicators (REIs) and proposed indicators for integrated chemical plants to be used in the daily operations of continuous and batch processes. They significantly extend available indicators as they cover resources overall and are based on the processing of real-time data that is available in the monitoring and control systems and from innovative analytical measurements. They form the basis for necessary steps from monitoring to improving resource efficiency through model-based real-time decision support provided to plant operators and plant managers.

Technical achievements were reported through the implementation in industrial cases. Two examples:

  • At Petronor the MORE partners optimised the distribution of hydrogen. Petronor estimates an economic gain of between EUR one million to EUR five million per annum equivalent to 3-5% of cost savings and a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 3.5%. 
  • At Lenzing, the specific steam consumption together with the overall cycle cost of the evaporator system was optimised with an economic impact of EUR 575 000 to EUR 825 000 per annum coupled with a significant reduction of direct CO2 emissions from the site by about 0.3%. 

More information
MORE – ‘Real-time Monitoring and Optimization of Resource Efficiency in Integrated Processing Plants’ (FP7 GA 604068) 

Read the SusChem White Paper ‘Impact: Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) in Horizon Europe’.