A Hierarchical Aggregation Concept For Resource Efficiency In Continuous Production Complexes

Sustainability and market pressure are key drivers for the chemical industry in Europe to increase energy and feedstock efficiency. The production sites in Europe consist of mature processes and suffer from partially higher feedstock prices. Since investments in new petrochemical production sites and plants concentrates on areas outside the EU (US and Asia) the current plants must be operated efficiently to he competitive. The introduction of real-time resource efficiency indicators (REIs) can be a way to reveal potentials for operational improvements and they can help to evaluate the process performance based on mass and energy flows. In this contribution, a method is presented that aggregates the REIs of plants within a production complex and that provides information on the root causes for deviations from the expected performance. The deviations are divided into the relevant contributing factors to enable users to identify performance losses and to react in real-time. Furthermore, this method can he applied to evaluate the resource intensity of a product throughout the entire process chain. The concept is consistent with the ISO 50001:2011 and ISO 14001:2015 standards and can be used for certification purposes.