Preface

"Natural resources are materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans." G. Tyler Miller and Scott E. Spoolman are pointing this out in their book Living in the Environment: Principles, Connections and Solutions. This statement already implies that the human race would face serious problems if the essential resources were not available any longer.

Three of these resources that today's society relies heavily on are non-renewable organic fossil resources, oil, gas and coal.

These three fossile resources are used in two ways:

1. 1. They are burned directly to produce more usable secondary energy such as heat, electricity or perpetuation, for example, within public and individual transport.
2. 2. They are used as raw materials in combination with the secondary energy to produce a very large range of products used in our daily lives such as polymers, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and agricultural support products.

Apart from non-renewable organic fossil resources, non-renewable (precious) metals and rare earth elements processed from ores play a major role and are important ingredients in our daily products. Finally, our production processes often release previously earth-bound materials or results of chemical reactions that are not typically found in nature to the environment where they are potentially harmful to us and to nature.

While we are progressing towards replacing power generation and fuels for mobility and transport by renewable sources such as the energy from the sun (solar and wind), this change is not as obvious for the materials that go into products that we use in our daily lives. For 150 years, fossil resources have been available in abundance, used to produce both secondary energy and usable products. In the future, this will most likely change, whereas the energy provided by the sun and the earth's core will stay available for a very long time compared to human lifetime.

The latter point is the reason this book concentrates on resources, encompassing both energy and raw materials. Standardization and legislation today is mainly concerned with sustainability from an energy point of view. Even the terms used are sometimes misleading; some reporting, for example, CEFIC,1 counts the raw materials used by the chemical industry as energy inputs, an "energy" that is then turned into products, while other reporting counts them as raw materials.

Producing and thereby using our resources efficiently, especially the ones that we deplete and that cannot be replaced easily, is one of the important cornerstones of maintaining our safe and comfortable lifestyle, most certainly during the bridging period of the next few decades between now and the emergence of new "quantum-leap" technology that can replace the way we produce our day-to-day necessities, during which we have to use old technology with fewer and fewer resources.

The aim of this book is to provide ideas to the process industry on how to improve its resource efficiency over the next decades until different, not yet envisioned technologies are available that will change the game completely.

Parts I to III discuss a broad range of ideas on how to improve resource efficiency by better plant management, process operations and changes of the plant setups. We provide concepts that can be applied directly. We review existing technologies and suggest new approaches and explain how to apply them and thus improve resource efficiency.

Most plants in the process industries operate for long periods of time, often for several decades. The measures taken to improve their energy and resource efficiency are strongly influenced by regulations and standards, which are covered in Part I, Resource Efficiency Metrics and Standardised Management Systems, of this book. Without physically changing the process equipment, the way the processes are operated can have a strong influence on the resource efficiency of the plants and this potential can be exploited with much smaller investments compared to the introduction of new process technologies. This aspect is the focus of Part II, Monitoring and Improvement of the Resource Efficiency through Improved Process Operations. In Part III, Improving Resource Efficiency by Process Improvement, we then discuss tools and ideas for changes of the process technology such as heat integration, synthesis and realization of optimal processes as well as industrial symbiosis as a means to improving resource efficiency.

The last part, Part IV, Company Culture for Resource Efficiency, deals with the people that are needed to make these changes possible and discusses the path towards a company and sector-wide resource efficiency culture.

In Chapter 1, Energy and Resource Efficiency in the Process Industries, the editors of the volume provide an overview of the situation of the process industries in Europe with respect to resources and discuss the meaning of resource efficiency today, pointing out that there is a specific interpretation of resource efficiency for the process industries. The options for improving resource efficiency by improving plant operations are also discussed.

Based on this introduction, the standard approach towards improving resource efficiency is discussed, mainly from the viewpoint of saving energy, as energy efficiency has been the focus of standardization and regulation in the first half of the current decade (2011-2015). Jan Uwe Lieback, David Kroll, Jochen Buser, Nico Behrendt and Seán Oppermann from GUTcert in Germany share their knowledge and experience in energy and resource management systems in Chapter 2. This chapter, Standards, Regulations and Requirements Concerning Energy and Resource Efficiency, provides an introduction to energy and resource management systems, describing the historical background and the evolution of the international standard on energy management systems ISO 50001 and its application. The chapter highlights how energy efficiency measures impact resource efficiency and where standardization for resource efficiency currently stands.

Marjukka Kujanpää, Tiina Pajulaa and Helena Wessman-Jääskeläinen from VTT in Finland discuss Energy and Resource Efficiency Reporting in Chapter 3. The chapter provides an overview of different mechanisms that can be used for resource efficiency reporting today and points out that none of the mechanisms include specific indicators for resource efficiency. However, the general ideas of these mechanisms are relevant when developing resource efficiency reporting schemes.

Gunther Windecker from BASF in Germany contributes industrial experience with Energy Efficiency Audits in Chapter 4. Energy efficiency audits are a consultation process that can be conducted independently from an energy management system. The audits are standardized and pursue the target to systematically identify energy flows, potentials for energy efficiency improvements and subsequent action plans. Gunther Windecker shows the practical steps of an energy audit for the process industries using a typical example - a cooling water pump system. While being an important measure to improve energy efficiency, energy audits do not cover resource efficiency in the process industries on a broader scope.

Part II, Monitoring and Improvement of the Resource Efficiency through ImprovedProcess Operations, describes new approaches to monitoring and reporting resource efficiency in real time for integrated processing plants. It focuses on operational improvements by means of defining suitable resource efficiency indicators, real-time reporting, improving online analytics, using IT systems to collect and process the data and pre-treating the data and using it for advanced control, optimization and decision support systems. In order to optimize the resource efficiency of the complete production system including the generation of electric power outside the plants, a chapter on demand side response shows how to use the flexibility of processing plants to respond to requests for increasing or decreasing their electric power consumption or the consumption of other resources in a controlled manner to deal with supply fluctuations. Part II finishes with a real industrial example in which many of the methods described in the previous chapters were applied such that a large chemical company saved significant amounts of energy.

In Chapter 5, Real-Time Performance Indicators for Energy and Resource Efficiency, Benedikt Beisheim and Stefan Krämer from INEOS in Köln, Germany, and Marc Kalliski, Daniel Ackerschott and Sebastian Engell from the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany describe results from the EU co-funded research project MORE2 (Real-Time Monitoring and Optimization of Resource Efficiency in Integrated Processing Plants). In this chapter, real-time resource efficiency indicators are discussed as the basis of solutions for real-time decision support and optimization to improve the resource efficiency of chemical plants. The indicators are related to the best demonstrated practice of the plants or units under consideration, which are computed taking into account the main influencing factors for the resource efficiency (e.g., the plant load) that cannot be influenced by the operators. The aggregation of indicators from plant sections to the enterprise level is described as well as methods for the analysis of the contribution of different plants or units and the root causes. The developed methods are explained for continuous, batch and...