Regular checks help maintain equipment
at our Deer Park refinery in Texas, USA.
We work continuously to improve the efficiency of our own operations, both to help reduce CO2 emissions and to be more cost competitive. Since 2005, we have followed a multi-billion dollar programme to increase the energy efficiency of our existing operations. We design new projects from the start to use energy efficiently.
We continue to work on improving energy efficiency at our refineries and chemical plants through a CO2 and energy management (CEM) programme. One of the programme’s goals is to recover and reuse heat where possible. For instance, at a number of our refineries, such as Martinez in the USA, we have installed equipment that can recover heat that would otherwise be lost to the atmosphere.
Another goal of the CEM programme is to install more efficient equipment to improve process operations. For example, at our Rhineland refinery complex in Germany we made changes to furnaces to improve energy use and reduce emissions.
The CEM programme uses a sophisticated software tool that conveys real-time information to plant control rooms on how efficiently production units are operating. Plant operators can then make adjustments to optimise energy efficiency.
We also focus on improving the energy efficiency of our oil and gas production facilities. This includes making changes to operations at our older sites. At Waterton in Canada we invested nearly C$2 million to improve the energy efficiency of our 50-year-old gas processing site. The processing units were not running efficiently due to a lack of gas from ageing fields to feed the plant. We arranged a supply of more gas from a third party, which significantly increased the flow of gas through the plant and helped improve energy efficiency by 30%.
