Important highlights
- AI, ML, and digitization are becoming more rapidly in tools for real-time monitoring and optimization, helping process engineers implement more data-driven sustainability improvements.
- Emissions and flow monitoring technologies such as CEM, GC, and TDL allow engineers to measure and manage important sustainability variables directly from the process stream.
There are many paths to sustainability, with equally diverse flavours along the way. However, some people are particularly suited to operational equipment, control systems, automation and support applications in the process industry. Most operators, process engineers and managers can undoubtedly identify more in their individual facilities and environments, but here are the most likely common types and settings.
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and digitalization. While most efforts are still in the experimental stage, AI, ML, and related digitization forms are rapidly evaluated and adapted to monitor, analyze, and optimize process applications. This means that it can also be used to support sustainability initiatives.
Continuous Emission Monitoring (CEM), Sampling and Analysis Systems. Equipment, analytical equipment, and other flows that examine emissions, process streams, and other flows such as gas chromatography (GC), spectroscopy, and tunable diode lasers (TDL) can be used to collect information and monitor sustainability-related variables.
Please don't fail. Applying patches of devices and units temporarily ignored cannot last forever. Certainly, you probably need capital expenditures (CAPEX) to exchange them. However, sustainability may be just an additional argument necessary to ultimately make some long-term upgrades and tilt the scale in favour of obtaining efficiency that contributes to sustainability.
Electricity as a process control variable. Thanks to increasingly detailed and continuous monitoring and metering, power has become a process control variable that can be managed and optimized using well-known automation methods and support software.
Find the leak and fix it. A huge savings in electricity and revenue can be generated by identifying and repairing water/wastewater holes, cracks and breaks with compressed air, custody transfers, and other gas and liquid infrastructure.
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Green product development. Instead of continuing to further optimize the process of creating unsustainable final products, they use existing know-how to participate in developing final products that are close to net-zero emissions.
Rethinking and utilizing previous waste. Multiple parallel, secondary, or combined cycling applications can be integrated to extract additional energy and functionality from the same initial equipment and processes, rather than discarding previously troubling or unemployed resources. For example, long-standing flaring in upstream natural gas wells and pads, as well as downstream refineries and plants, can generate electricity that can be stored by electrolyzing it to hydrogen or using it for other tasks.
Simplify networking. Reduces hurdles by adopting free industrial networking from traditional rigid, proprietary technologies, and a more open version of the usual Ethernet-based protocol. Recent efforts in these areas include Open Process Automation Standards (O-PAS), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) Publish Subscription Protocol, and Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) and Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL) protocols.
