Industrial consumer tips
General
Mining
- Raise the general awareness of energy conservation across the organization through the use of multiple communications such as newsletters, screen savers, intranets and posters.
- Educate personnel on how they can save energy and money at home and good energy practices are then translated to the workplace.
- Establish a three-year energy plan with concrete goals and shorter term targets within the overall plan to help maintain focus.
- Conduct and energy audit to identify where energy savings can be achieved.
- Install appropriate monitoring systems and develop effective reporting methods.
- Establish accountability for energy use in the reporting units across the enterprise.
Pulp and Paper
- Employ simulations to ensure energy efficiency improvements to one part of the process will not adversely affect other parts of the process.
- Evaluate each process area in a mill against the industry average and with the model mill, to see how it compares with best practices and where it can be improved.
- Cut fossil fuel consumption by increasing the use of renewable resources such as wood residue and other biomass from forests, as well as increasing cogeneration.
Steel Making
- Equip reheating furnaces, coke ovens and blast furnace stoves to fire steel plant fuel gases, to minimize the purchase of other fuels.
- Burn the remaining steel plant fuel gases in cogeneration power plants to produce electricity and steam for internal use and sale
- Recover basic oxygen furnace (bof) gas and deliver it to the power plant boilers.
- Maintain and improve steam line insulation and steam traps.
Smelting and Refining
- Consider developing meaningful energy performance indicators specific to your foundry’s needs.
- Conduct seminars or awareness sessions for all operators to explain:
– the energy costs and the means of their control;
– the effect of good housekeeping on driving energy costs down; and
– the importance of proper operational practices.
- Review the indicators regularly at operations management meetings. Keep employees informed – communicate the results.
- Use the energy cost results in developing and reviewing business plans, alternate energy plans and capital projects. Use the energy cost indicators as a management tool to improve performance.
- Involve all employees – the electricity conservation effort must be broad-based and have the support of the operators.
- Review the scheduling of foundry operations in view of the factors involved in the cost of electricity they consume.
- Track energy use by establishing a baseline of power consumption during plant shutdowns on statutory holidays.
- Track and trend power consumption based on production and non-production days to spot the energy wasters. Then develop procedures and shutdown checklists to ensure that equipment shutdowns are taking place.
- Schedule powering of electric induction furnaces in sequence so as to avoid creating power demand peaks unnecessarily.
- Use correctly sized equipment for the job.
- Maintain all equipment in top operating condition.
- Switch off equipment when not in use.
- Minimize distances for transporting materials (e.g., scrap, returns, sand, moulds) and conveying molten metals.
- Prevent scrap generation by maintaining proper process controls and correct operation practices (e.g., temperatures and degassing of molten metal).
- Recover all metal from rejects, cutoffs, shakeouts, and so on.
Cement
- Reduce consumption of fossil fuels by using alternative fuels that are by-products from other industries. Such alternative fuels include scrap tires, waste solvents and used oil, asphalt shingles, oily rags and filters, and spent pot liner.
- Biomass fuel use reduces consumption of other traditional fuel sources, such as coal, while also reducing GHG emissions. Other alternative fuels growing in importance are biomass materials such as wood chips, sludge, treated wood, paper and carton are also being used by industry.
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognizes that the use of tire-derived fuels is a viable alternative to the use of fossil fuels Scrap tire-derived fuel, or TDF, is used because of its high heating value – 25-50% higher than coal and 100-200% higher than wood.
Petroleum
- Increase use of cogeneration at oilsands operations, using excess heat generated for SAGD operations to generate electricity.
 
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