Waste Heat Recovery for power generation and CO2 footprint reduction
Waste Heat Recovery for power generation and CO2 footprint reduction
The integration of Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) with Air Pollution Control (APC) systems is an established standard for Tri-Mer Global Technologies.
Nowadays, electricity use is seen as “green”, but we all know that not all the power is generated by renewable sources, so its generation from a waste gas stream at high temperature is a clear way of reducing CO2 footprint of an industrial process. Moreover, self-generating energy has today an RoI in the range of 2-4 years in most countries and gives the huge advantage of reducing the dependency from the power market price fluctuations that are strongly affecting the manufacturing industry today.
The application of the well-known ORC technology allows high efficiencies with low temperatures; a flue gas stream at temperature of 250-300°C is enough to be a good source of energy to feed an ORC module and generate power. At Tri-Mer Global, we provide solutions that utilise the waste heat, decoupling the heat recovery from the manufacturing process, avoiding any influence on production, furnace pressure, or other potential operation changes. Our gas to oil (or superheated water) heat exchanger systems absorb the load variation and deliver the heat to the ORC system that, with a design that incorporates high operational flexibility, is able to keep high recovery efficiency even at 40% of its design load.
The integration of the heat exchangers after a high-temperature ceramic filter allows the design of ultra-clean heat exchangers without any risk of corrosion and fouling, increasing the recoverable heat and reducing the investment costs.
The Glass, Steel, Aluminium, Cement, Ceramic, Oil&Gas and Chemical industries can certainly profit from this technology.
Recently, one of our European customers has invested in this solution for their 3 production furnaces, recovering up to 15 MW of thermal energy, that is transferred through thermal oil to the ORC, generating 3,5 MW of electric power. The calculated payback time is 2,6 years. Using avg. EU emission factor, this gives a saving of 6.200 t/yr of CO2.