Operational Performance and Sustainability

At the 2022 ARC Industry Forum, Emerson’s Mart Berutti conducted a workshop titled, Operational Performance and Sustainability. Here is the description of the workshop.

As we drive to greener manufacturing, we see significant synergies between the goals for better operations performance and greater sustainability. In this session, we will look at how both goals are reached in the following examples:

  • Digitalization of greenfield capital projects – building for green operational excellence
  • Energy efficiency, emission management, carbon tracking, and water management in the digital transformation of existing assets
  • Digital operations in circular economy investments
  • Technology to support the acceleration of the hydrogen value chain
  • Operations performance and digitalization in green fuels production
  • Documenting and dashboarding of sustainability and operations KPIs and applying best practices to other enterprise assets

Mart opened by explaining how the digitalization of capital projects decreases deployment costs and increases profitability.
Digital Transformation in Capital Projects

He explained that using Business Performance Modeling technology during the design phase to predict the future performance of plant systems and quantify the value and risk of all improvement opportunities creates value. Business Performance Models can be used during daily operations to predict the future performance of plant systems based on real-time alerts and events and to optimize Production Planning & Scheduling.

Mart shared many examples where customers have improved operational performance and operational sustainability. The first was data management for carbon tracking. Tracking systems were set up to collect emissions data and rolled up to the corporate accounting systems. The project team identified opportunities to reduce carbon intensity with AI, machine learning, and control optimization strategies.

Another case was tracking CO2 with Energy Management Systems. Fuel combustion in furnaces and boilers is one of the largest CO2 emitters in most refining & petrochemical sites. For refineries, FCC flue gas and Coker off-gas are also significant contributors. EMIS tracks primary energy and off-gas streams to/from each process unit and sums across areas and plants, and highlights over-consumption events. Plant staff can view energy consumption in terms of Gj, $, or CO2e per ton of product produced. This solution for long-term tracking to demonstrate improvements toward its goal of Net Zero operations.
Real-Time Analytics to Monitor & Model for Optimized Operations
Predictive Emissions Monitoring Systems (PEMS) is another example of driving sustainability improvements.
Predictive Emissions Monitoring System
The real-time embedded analytics combined with traditional sensor measurements enable robust monitoring and actionable information to be derived.

These are but a few examples of solutions to support sustainable initiatives. Visit the Operations & Business Management section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies and solutions to drive improved business performance.

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