(181b) How a Chemical Industry Technology Supplier Approaches Sustainability Needs

As the chemical industry and value chain react to sustainability requirements, technology providers need to support these initiatives, or risk losing relevancy to their customer base. Offerings in process automation and plant engineering solutions need to deliver business capabilities that match transparency, governance, and audit needs and deliver capabilities that enable us to reach end-to-end sustainability as a final result of our daily work.

This abstract will explore the ground-level impact of a company declaring sustainability as a focus horizontal market function that drives consistent top-down messages to markets, and operates a center of competence focuses on strategy and in enabling front-line go-to-market teams, such as the one the author works for dedicated to chem industry. In practice people and portfolio need to adapt internally and externally to a re-alignment of operational priorities of chemical owner-operators.

Demonstrating innovation leadership through different solutions that bolster enterprise lifecycle excellence, advanced engineering simulation, and process plant authoring in collaboration with original equipment manufacturers; process technology licensors; engineering, procurement, and constructor companies; service providers; and plant operations; in addition to any other stakeholders; is what is needed to take sustainability to the next level in a traditional industry such as ours.

In R&D, being able to manage the execution of engineering tasks from multiscale molecule modeling, to multiphysics fluid dynamics, to 3D and system simulation of assets, to 1st principle chemical process models is a guarantee for hitting sustainability requirements. Being able to take what has been modeled off-line into real live process control applications in the form of real-time and closed-loop optimization is a way to bridge the sustainability achievements accomplished by R&D with actual plant operations.

Having the capability to set enterprise-level requirements for different topics, such as the reuse of feedstock, recycling of materials, reaching circular economy, and monitoring key environmental and societal items, as a part of project and lifecycle cost controls is a starting point for lifecycle excellence. This management level approach connects not only to the tasks in the R&D space, but also extends to monitoring contracted OEM and EPC companies and their milestone progress to make sure that complete engineering deliverables reach plant operations in the intended way.

The two areas above can be structured as simplified digital threads that enable complex and sub-contracted organizations to work together delivering a more sustainable reality, should we so choose. A third digital thread, in connection with lifecycle management and advanced simulation, is authoring the engineering work that goes into creating a process plant design that is available and can be evaluated in sustainability context. These digital threads are available today to support sustainability engineering, together with compatible software and hardware that make our lives easier and our targets more achievable.

Author will present a modern setup to support engineering, reference examples, and concepts that promote and adapt to sustainable engineering in industry 4.0.