Waste heat recovery is a readily available strategy for industrial decarbonization. Currently, 20-50% of the total energy used at manufacturing facilities is emitted into the atmosphere as waste heat. More than 70% of that waste heat is rejected from thermal processes, which include drying, separations, refrigeration, and process cooling. When thermal process heat reaches a temperature that is no longer usable, the facility’s only option is to release that heat into the atmosphere.
Many of these waste heat streams—whether from high-temperature exhaust gasses or low-temperature cooling water—can be captured and reused to preheat materials or provide supplementary energy for other processes. This reuse can drastically improve a facility’s overall energy efficiency.
Recovering and reusing waste heat can significantly increase facility efficiency and reduce dependency on fossil fuel-fired boilers, leading to cost savings and reduced Scope 1 emissions. Furthermore, waste heat recovery can be done without disruption to existing processes, meaning no facility downtime or impact on operations.
Read on to see common considerations and challenges for waste heat recovery, and learn how waste heat can be seamlessly incorporated into industrial decarbonization projects.
Deep Decarbonization With Waste Heat Recovery
Waste heat recovery plays a crucial role in the journey toward deep decarbonization, offering both environmental and financial benefits. By capturing and reusing energy that would otherwise be lost, waste heat recovery provides a buffer against energy price volatility while advancing sustainability goals in the following ways:
- Enhancing Energy Efficiency
- Waste heat recovery systems drastically improve overall energy efficiency by harnessing thermal energy from industrial processes and repurposing it to generate useful steam, heat, or electricity. This reduces the need for additional fuel, leading to lower energy consumption. The U.S. Department of Energy highlights that waste heat recovery systems can increase industrial efficiency by up to 50%, offering substantial energy savings across various sectors.
- Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
- By reusing energy that would normally dissipate into the atmosphere, companies can significantly reduce their carbon footprint. Industrial processes are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing over 20% of global CO2 emissions. Implementing waste heat recovery systems can cut emissions at the source, helping companies achieve net-zero or carbon-neutral goals faster.
- Increasing Operational Efficiency
- Integrating waste heat recovery into industrial operations not only improves energy efficiency but also enhances operational performance. Recovering waste heat reduces the strain on primary heating systems, improving overall reliability and longevity. Additionally, it allows industries to stabilize energy use, especially in energy-intensive operations, leading to more predictable and optimized processes.
- Reducing Costs
- As energy costs fluctuate, waste heat recovery serves as a buffer by lowering overall energy demand. By using otherwise wasted heat, companies can decrease their reliance on purchased energy, reducing both operational expenses and exposure to volatile fuel markets. Over time, these savings compound, making waste heat recovery a sound financial investment with quick payback periods.
Competitive Advantage of Waste Heat Recovery
The integration of waste heat recovery provides a distinct edge over other thermal technologies by offering both immediate cost reductions and long-term environmental benefits. By decarbonizing industrial processes and lowering energy consumption, companies not only meet regulatory requirements but also position themselves as leaders in sustainability, which can attract environmentally-conscious customers and investors.
As more industries adopt waste heat recovery, it stands to become a cornerstone in industrial decarbonization strategies, helping businesses transition to a low-carbon economy while maintaining competitiveness.
Fundamental Considerations & Challenges for Waste Heat Recovery
As described above, waste heat recovery leads to multiple benefits at industrial manufacturing facilities, including increased energy efficiency and reduced operational costs. However, waste heat recovery can be complex because there are many different sources of thermal process heat at manufacturing facilities, which may have different conditions, availability, or configurations.
Consequently, waste heat recovery comes with a unique set of considerations that must be addressed for successful integration, including:
- Waste heat source variability: The temperature, composition, and availability of waste heat can vary widely depending on the industrial process, making it difficult to standardize recovery systems across different facilities. Integrating with waste heat sources requires careful consideration of the industrial facility in order to maximize efficiency.
- Process-specific integration: Waste heat recovery systems often tie in directly to a specific industrial process at a manufacturing facility, requiring costly and time-consuming bespoke design and pinch analysis.
- Need for continuous operation: The risk of operational disruptions when installing new technologies is a significant concern, as any unplanned downtime can have significant impacts on production.
Despite these challenges, waste heat recovery remains a highly effective strategy for industrial decarbonization, offering the potential for substantial energy savings, reduced reliance on fossil fuels, and lower emissions. By carefully addressing these considerations, industries can successfully harness the power of waste heat to drive deep decarbonization efforts.
Industrial Heat Pumps: An Ideal Solution For Waste Heat Recovery
Waste heat recovery is essential to deep decarbonization, and with technologies like industrial heat pumps, manufacturers can utilize waste heat sources to decrease their CO2 emissions without compromising operations.
Industrial heat pumps capture low-temperature waste heat from industrial processes and use it to generate high-quality steam, matching the output of conventional boilers. In particular, steam-generating heat pumps (SGHPs) built on mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) technology allow manufacturers to capture significant efficiency advantages and cost savings for their facilities.
By reducing reliance on fossil-fuel boilers, MVR SGHPs reduce natural gas consumption, cutting both operational costs and Scope 1 emissions for manufacturers. However, like waste heat integration in general, MVR SGHPs have historically required customized design and bespoke integration into manufacturing facilities.
With these challenges, how can waste heat integration be streamlined to ensure that manufacturing facilities are fully maximizing their efficiency and cost advantages?
Seamless Integration For Waste Heat Recovery
Skyven knows that manufacturers cannot risk disrupting existing facility operations for waste heat recovery, and designs projects accordingly. To optimize waste heat recovery, Skyven has developed the Skyven Arcturus Steam-Generating Heat Pump (SGHP). Arcturus deeply decarbonizes industrial steam with seamless integration into just two common points: the waste heat source and the steam header. With Arcturus, there’s no unplanned facility downtime during installation or operation.
To understand how Arcturus optimizes waste heat recovery, it is first crucial to understand how Arcturus works. First, Arcturus sources low-grade waste heat from commonly-available on-site heat sources at temperatures as low as 80-90F. These low-grade waste heat sources typically take the form of process exhaust or process fluid from on-site thermal processes. Arcturus sources this low-grade waste heat using a bypassable heat exchanger. This means that Arcturus is not tied to a specific process or location in the facility, as hot water from the heat exchanger can easily be transported across the facility. Consequently, Arcturus can be placed up to a half-mile away from the industrial facility. Additionally, this bypassability means that the facility processes are not disrupted during installation or maintenance of the Arcturus system.
Moreover, with the majority of waste heat sources for Arcturus falling into either process exhaust or process fluid categories, Skyven has standardized heat exchanger integration to further remove complexity associated with waste heat integration.
In summary, Skyven’s cutting-edge design and facility-level integration of Arcturus addresses the challenges traditionally associated with waste heat source integration in the following ways:
- Standardized integration and design: Heat exchanger integration is standardized in two different ways depending on whether the heat source is fluid or exhaust. Skyven’s experience across a range of manufacturing facilities and sectors provides a comprehensive knowledge of heat source variability necessary for standardization.
- Process-independent for smooth operations: Skyven’s bypassable integration of the heat exchanger means that Arcturus does not directly interact with the waste heat source. This provides multiple advantages, including the ability to place Arcturus up to a half-mile from the heat source.
- Continuous operations with no downtime required: The bypassable heat exchanger also means that no downtime is required for installation or maintenance of Arcturus.
Skyven has the experience and knowledge necessary to integrate with waste heat sources at manufacturing facilities, ensuring no disruption to operations. For example, Skyven recently executed six decarbonization projects with California Dairies, Inc. (CDI), a multi-billion dollar dairy manufacturing company that requires 24/7/365 facility uptime.
These projects are seamlessly integrated into the waste heat source and steam header at two separate facilities, with no unplanned downtime required during installation or operation. Ultimately, these projects have reduced over 7,000 MT CO2 with no changes to production quality at either site.
Decarbonize Your Facility With No CapEx
Advancements in Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) models have lowered and even removed the financial barriers for implementation for companies of all sizes. Through these models, facilities can implement waste heat recovery solutions without any capital expenditure, allowing them to benefit from immediate cost savings and emission reductions without upfront investment.
Skyven Technologies decarbonizes hard-to-abate industries by recovering waste heat to produce clean, emissions-free steam using their Arcturus steam generating heat pump. Skyven’s proven Energy-as-a-Service model allows industrial manufacturers to achieve significant carbon footprint reductions without the upfront capital expenditure, leading to profitable decarbonization.
Learn how you can recover waste heat at your facility, save on operating costs, and help promote environmental health.
