Abstract

Industrial facilities typically have long lives and consume large amounts of energy year by year during their operations phase. Intervention in the design stage to independently review energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy inherent in the original design can identify opportunities that will offer significant benefits on a life cycle basis.

The energy design review concept can be applied to any project for expansion or upgrade of an existing industrial plant or to Greenfield industrial projects. The approach is to carry out an independent cross functional review of the design for the new industrial facilities to identify opportunities to use energy more efficiently and/or use more renewable energy. These reviews should be carried out with the project team to identify opportunities that have reasonable incremental capital costs and have little or no impacts on safety, maintenance, reliability and operating flexibility of the future facility. On completion of the review, the prioritized opportunities would then be assessed as part of the corporate approval process for the design of the project and those ideas that are accepted would then be carried forward by the project team.

In a recent energy design review assignment for a new oil sands processing plant, Hatch identified a number of opportunities which taken together could reduce the future facility's annual energy use by up to 40%.

Energy design reviews can have a significant impact on industrial energy use and are applicable at each stage of project development from the conceptual level through to project implementation.

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