From 1 January 2028, the obligation to transmit online continuous measurement data also applies to selected sectors such as petrochemicals. These changes will require chemical companies to invest in monitoring technology and modify their plants to meet stricter emission limits. We spoke with Jan Krišpín, CEO of ORGREZ, a. s., a company with nearly 70 years of experience in environmental protection and energy care, about the introduction of emission monitoring, flue gas and off-gas cleaning systems, as well as increasing the energy efficiency of chemical and petrochemical plants.
As part of the revision of the EU Directive, emission limits are being tightened. In addition, residents' concerns about the safety of industrial plants are growing. What does this mean for chemical plants?
The European Union has been undergoing a change in legislation, affecting in particular the Industrial Emissions Directive and the new BREF/BAT. This has attacked all plants that are tightening up on what they emit into the air, especially methane emissions, which can arise from these plants, albeit to a more limited extent, because there are more often other off-gases from production.
As far as petrochemicals are concerned, this is of course linked to the pressure to decarbonise road, shipping and air transport, so there is more of a drive to find alternative chemical processes, whether based on the use of ethanol and its combination into higher hydrocarbons, pyrolysis processes and so on. This means looking for sources other than oil. There has been talk for a long time about using hydrogen, re-carbonising it and using it in this process, looking for waste plastics that could be chemically recycled, or using cellulose as a primary input, or capturing CO2 and combining it with hydrogen. So alternative processes do exist, but research and development in this area is not yet close to being economically competitive and therefore not yet a real industrial application. Thus, I see efforts to decarbonise petrochemicals and chemistry in the near term more in the direction of energy savings and reducing other environmental impacts of these operations.
It is with the disposal of waste air and substances that the ORGREZ Group, or its company EVECO Brno, has the greatest experience in the chemical industry. Is that right?
Yes. The energy solution was not so important because energy was not so expensive. We have historically been in contact with chemical companies and refineries primarily to address their emissions. Whether it's emissions monitoring or various flue gas and off-gas cleaning systems. We have a significant number of references for various afterburners and catalytic converters that effectively get rid of impurities in the air, including the associated engineering. To name a few, we have supplied Slovnaft, Paramo, Synthesii, Borsodchem, Unipetrol, Chemko Strážské and DEZA. In the field of flue gas and waste gas treatment we provide the entire process from the study to the delivery and implementation of the technological solution including the follow-up service. We also help to solve problems related to compliance with emission limits.
For several plants, we have also solved the heating of process media. At MND, for example, we have also had experience with gas storage tanks, where it was necessary to preheat the expanding gas being discharged from the tank as protection against freezing of valves.
Can you outline specific experiences and describe current good practice and common obstacles?
Our company EVECO Brno has a long-term cooperation with the Slovnaft refinery in Bratislava, where we successfully reconstructed first one and then the second line of the hazardous waste incinerator, where industrial sludge from this refinery is disposed of. This means that the waste streams that arise from the oil processing there end up in this incinerator, where they are burned and the resulting flue gases are treated so that they are not hazardous to the air. The sludge treated in this way is already stable enough to be landfilled after incineration and does not cause further problems. Of course, it produces a not entirely negligible amount of heat. This heat is not currently available for use within the site, because the refinery also generates heat within other operations and is at the same time relatively remote from the other operations. In the past it has been considered whether it would make sense to generate electricity from this operation, for example through an ORC cycle. However, it is precisely the problem that the plant was so small in the context of a chemical plant of this size, the cost of energy so low and the subject of decarbonisation so young that it was not sufficiently interesting for investment.
So the heat that is not used is released into the air?
That's right. Similarly, for example, within the Litvínov chemical plant we have a plant where the off-gases from the warehouse are burned, where petrol vapours escape. This means that air is drawn in to mix with the petrol. This is refuelled within our furnace, which then recovers the waste heat to preheat the combustion air, thereby improving combustion conditions. There, it was known from the outset that there would be no use for heat, and it would be highly problematic in this case. That said, the aim was to be able to dispose of this air as efficiently as possible so that petrol vapour did not escape into the air. In this operation, I can imagine at some magnitude of heat recovery. Today, of course, we are talking about the fact that there are a number of other waste streams that we now consider to be necessary to deal with, based on the Industrial Emissions Directive. I therefore see the biggest challenge for the future as working with the excess heat so that it is not emitted into the air and is recovered in the plant while reducing primary fuels. This heat is generally not at such a high temperature that it is worth generating steam and electricity from it using traditional methods. At the same time, this is usually in the wrong place. It would be useful in the city, but it is out of it for entirely rational reasons.
Here, it seems, there is no solution how to use this heat efficiently?
In that sense, it's a really hard problem to solve, because I don't think anyone wants to live in a chemical plant. So it's all about minimising the heat output as much as possible, putting it back into the process and looking for new ways to use the residual streams in other ways than just burning them. But that's not always possible. It's simply a combination of the energy and chemistry approach. New opportunities in waste heat recovery come from ORC units and high temperature heat pumps, which have undergone major technological developments in recent years. There is also an additional financial and environmental incentive for operators.
Let's go back to the obligation to measure emissions continuously that we mentioned at the beginning. Will it be a big problem for chemical companies to apply air emission measurement and reporting systems to their plants?
I don't see this as a major technical challenge, continuous measurement is a well-established practice in chemistry as well as in the energy industry. In more than 30 years of practice, ORGREZ itself has experience with a very wide range of installations in the Czech Republic and abroad. Within the chemical industry, we have implemented emission monitoring in Unipetrol, for example. For our customers, we provide continuous measurement, monitoring and evaluation of emissions in accordance with applicable legislation. In addition to the measurement system itself, we also provide ongoing service and consulting support, including maintenance of operational records and preparation of reports for the state administration. What is new, however, is the online transfer of data to the state administration, and here we are certainly a strong partner, including the associated communication.
We supply evaluation systems for continuous emissions measurement and for operational and process measurements in a complete turnkey service package. The deliveries include analysers from world-leading manufacturers as well as our own user-friendly software. We use the collected data to provide records and outputs for the state administration, as well as to evaluate the quality and other physical and economic indicators of the operation.
We touched on environmental data. There must be a lot of different non-financial data in a chemical operation, if you include the whole value chain. How do you assess the readiness of chemical companies to process and report them in ESG reporting?
In our experience, working with data is a major problem in many companies. To be able to report reliable, comparable information on their sustainability performance, they first have to identify, verify, integrate and process data of many variables and formats, from many sources, and let's face it, environmental data is the hardest part. Just as companies already have standardized and automated financial reporting, they must also prepare for timely and iterative sustainability reporting. ORGREZ has historically been close to environmental data, so with the new customer reporting, we have developed automated data collection and processing for non-financial reporting and management decision making. We can help identify all relevant ESG data, source databases and information systems that chemical plants have. We integrate all relevant data, automate the entire process and provide online processing, including data sourced from the holding structure and from suppliers, customers and other business partners.
Let's move on to energy intensity. This is another major challenge for the chemical and petrochemical industries, along with high energy prices and the drive to reduce dependence on Russian gas and oil supplies.
The biggest problem we are facing today is that the customer himself is faced with uncertainty about what is actually going to happen and is trying to find a strategy for his own core business. It's difficult to plan for energy when it's difficult to plan for what's actually going to happen with the operation itself, what its products are going to be, and what the other strategic decisions are going to be, let's say, for the development of the whole site. If you are going to build an energy business that will have a payback period of, say, 8 to 10 years, those decisions are very difficult. Even we, in terms of designing an energy solution, the first thing we try to do is understand the core-business and the business case of the customer. Based on that, we are able to design energy solutions.
In terms of the energy intensity of the operation, it's not so much about the electricity, but rather the heat consumption for the various refining and chemical processes and other parts of the industry that are very heat intensive. To a lesser extent, it is about the price of energy and the price of the commodities that they use, that is, the price of gas, electricity and the input of emission allowances into this sector.
So we are back to the heat and making the best use of it within the premises.
Chemical and petrochemical plants have always aimed to make the most of their energy. I wouldn't be afraid to say that long before the energy industry itself was energy efficient, petrochemistry was going in that direction. I believe the opportunity lies in the potential of waste streams that are, shall we say, a little cooler. However, I have not yet seen larger industrial heat pumps being used to a greater extent within these operations, or being used for power generation through ORC systems, which is another opportunity. The technical expertise for these applications was lacking and mistakes could not be afforded by the sector, due to safety and potential economic damage in the event of failure. That is also why I expect that sooner or later there should be more and more of a degree of electrification of these processes.
On the other hand, I see the possibility of more work with the external market. The chemical companies are primarily focused on their production, which is logical, but I think that today they have not yet discovered the inherent potential of large inputs and outputs within their installed equipment for trading on the market. The ability to buy power cheaply at the right hours, or alternatively to feed excess power into the grid, is another opportunity for upgrading. Similarly, I don't think the larger application of renewables within their facilities is significant yet either.
Within chemical plant sites it is also worth looking at whether they are wasting energy unnecessarily in transformation. With increasing demands for efficiency and loss reduction in power networks, we have developed mobile diagnostic equipment to measure the efficiency of distribution transformers. Accurate efficiency measurements under real-world conditions provide key data to optimize operating conditions and costs, minimize network losses, improve reliability, and also provide the basis for effective investment decisions. We also contribute to the reliable, safe operation and increased lifetime of HV equipment within chemical plants by regular diagnostics and long-term monitoring of the condition of the electrical insulation system of transformers, and we perform diagnostics of HV motors and generators. Among the clients of our HV and HV Testing Laboratory are Slovnaft.
You mentioned the involvement of renewables. Which ones are proving successful?
Of course, the primary target is to use the installed photovoltaics. The usual tendency is to look at self-consumption after electricity use. I also see a connection with, for example, high-temperature heat pumps, because they can be used to produce heat with a higher potential, or for example, using heat to produce electricity just by using the ORC systems mentioned. Inevitably, this does not mean that the chemical company has to build the PV plant itself, it can have it dedicated somewhere else or, for example, buy electricity with a guarantee of origin. There the possibilities are even broader, e.g. in connection with a water source. With a bit of imagination, they can also have the potential to use geothermal energy, but that is a matter of site-specific conditions.
So, rather than supplementing renewables, the potential is to use electrification and increase savings?
They're connected vessels for me. The times are conducive to the diversification of energy systems, and this is linked both to the deployment of RES and to a greater degree of electrification. It should also be added that this also means a more complex management system and a different approach to trading energy commodities. Today, the market is in a situation where many people have built their own photovoltaic power plants, often sized far beyond their own consumption, and are now finding that there is no use for the energy generated at certain times. It is therefore up to the market to deal with this. Whether there will be a market entity that can connect this or whether it will be the industrial customers themselves. We are also looking at the fact that sooner or later there will be a stronger electric mobility. That said, there is also some potential for sector-coupling, i.e., taking advantage of the fact that an operation that has a load can afford, for example, a temporary shutdown while an EV is charging or, conversely, I can imagine scheduling the charging of a corporate fleet according to operational peaks. In this way, mutual deviations can be balanced out and bring additional market potential. To simplify - you have a large operation where changes are theoretically possible, for example in scheduling, when you increase, and conversely decrease, power. Of course, these operations have a lot of inertia, and not everyone can afford it. Typically, for example, in plants that are betting operations, if they use electricity for their production, moving the whole schedule, for example, two hours later can make a big difference. That alone can make a marked difference in the cost of operation.
I see further scope to push the optimization even further. Not only in terms of the production of the products, their actual cost and marketability, but also in terms of energy efficiency, i.e. how to actually synchronise the whole system. Many large plants optimise their operations according to stock market prices. Accordingly, they determine which product they will produce and in what quantities so that it pays off as a total operation. But maybe they are not playing so much with the fact that at this point in time it might be more profitable to consume more electricity, or vice versa, or to fine-tune the energy there a little bit through electrification.
This is about a comprehensive energy concept to make everything work so smartly and automatically.
Exactly. Modern systems for the production of heat, cold and electricity, which combine various technologies and storage, must be able to respond to price fluctuations on the market in the order of months, days and hours, and in the near future even in the order of fifteen minutes. Our great advantage is the ability to model and evaluate the entire energy operation, evaluate it economically and environmentally and design an operating plan so that the system is predictable and price stable.