Key highlights
- AI, ML and digitalization are rapidly becoming tools for real-time monitoring and optimization, helping process engineers implement more data-driven sustainability improvements.
- Emissions and flow monitoring technologies like CEM, GC and TDL empower engineers to measure and manage critical sustainability variables directly from process streams.
There are many roads to sustainability and equally diverse flavors along the way. However, some are especially well-suited to operating equipment, control systems, and automation and support applications in the process industries. Most operators, process engineers and managers can doubtless identify more in their individual facilities and environments, but here are some of the most probable common types and settings:
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and digitalization. Though most efforts are still in experimental stages, AI, ML and related digitalization forms are quickly being evaluated and adapted for monitoring, analyzing and optimizing process applications, which means they can also be used to aid sustainability initiatives.
Continuous emissions monitoring (CEM), sampling and analysis systems. Instruments, analyzers and methods of examining emissions, process streams and other flows, such as gas chromatography (GC), spectroscopy, tunable diode lasers (TDL) and others, can be used to collect information, and monitor for sustainability-related variables.
Don’t run to failure. Temporarily patching up neglected devices and units can’t go on forever. Granted, replacing them will likely require some capital expenditures (CapEx). However, sustainability may be just the additional argument needed to tip the scales in favor of finally making some long-overdue upgrades, and gaining efficiencies that also contribute to sustainability.
Electricity as a process control variable. Thanks to increasingly granular and continuous monitoring and metering, electrical power has become process control variable that can be managed and optimized using well-known automation methods and support software.
Find and fix leaks. Enormous savings in power and revenue can be generated by identifying and repairing holes, cracks and breaks in water/wastewater with compressed air, custody transfer and other gas and liquid infrastructures.
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Green product development. Instead of just continuing to further optimize processes that make unsustainable end-products, seek to use existing know-how to participate in developing greener end-products using closer to net-zero emissions.
Rethink and harness former waste. Multiple parallel, secondary or combined-cycle applications could be integrated to extract added energy and capabilities from the same initial equipment and processes—rather than discarding formerly troublesome or less-profitable resources. For example, long-time flaring at upstream natural gas wells and pads, and at downstream refineries and plants could produce power that might be stored by electrolyzing it into hydrogen or used for other tasks.
Simplify networking. Free industrial networking from traditional, rigid, proprietary technologies, and reduce hurdles by adopting more open versions of typically Ethernet-based protocols. Some recent efforts in these areas include the Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) publish-subscribe protocol, and the Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE) and Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL) protocols.
