Many steps have been taken towards decarbonising heat among industry players. Steam-based heating is now the next urgent point in industrial decarbonisation. Read this article to learn about the challenges in steam decarbonisation and why digital tools offer the best solution.

If there’s one thing industrial companies have in common—from chemical and metallurgical to manufacturing and food processing—it’s that many require heat to power a variety of processes, often via steam. Heat is also the source of the sector’s core challenges on the pathway to decarbonisation.

Industrial heat accounts for two-thirds of industrial energy demand and over a fifth of global energy consumption.[1] The biggest chunk of the sector’s CO2 emissions—roughly 7.5 Gigatonnes or about 21% of global CO2 emissions in 2016[2]—arise from the generation of heat.

Many steps have been taken towards decarbonising heat, and steam-based heating is now the next urgent point in industrial decarbonisation.

The pressure to decarbonise industry is growing

Multiple forces drive the shift towards decarbonisation and future proofing industry through new technologies, including:

Steam has become an urgent factor in decarbonisation

Although steam has always been a crucial energy carrier for industry, it has until recently been considered as a utility that is less important than core processes on the path to decarbonisation.

Contrary to sectors like district heating where optimising heat production and distribution is a clear priority, industry players are looking at multiple items on their priority lists – and steam is just one of them. Industry continuously balances and reprioritises these issues, causing steam to drop down the list.

In many industrial settings, a sizable portion of the required heat is delivered through centrally generated steam, which is distributed across the plant. Sectors such as pulp and paper manufacturing, chemicals and refining are particularly dependent on steam, with around 50% of their heat needs covered this way.

Once considered a low-margin utility service, steam has now become a critical element in the transformation towards decarbonisation. However, it comes with several challenges organisations should address before reaping the benefits of more efficient and sustainable heat production.

5 challenges of steam decarbonisation

1. Steam networks are complex 

The complexity of steam as a medium is a significant hurdle as it’s complex to model and hard to measure. Steam networks often lack extensive sensor coverage and high-quality data, making it more difficult for organisations to accurately assess steam balance, flows and network conditions.

Modelling the dynamics of change across multiple pressure levels is also challenging due to many influential factors and interdependencies. Since steam is critical for many processes, applied changes must not compromise safety or accurate demand forecasting.

2. Organisations face challenges that impact the transition

Organisational challenges complicate the transition further. Steam is often produced and distributed by an external utility, limiting control and transparency in operational planning. The outflow of experienced staff and the lack of new personnel, coupled with the loss of tacit and expert knowledge, worsens the issue, especially since many systems are still controlled by operators based on their experience.

Other obstacles in this space include complex internal setups among innovation departments, IT, and plant management, along with generational changes and varying global versus local regulations.

3. Industry needs to balance quick wins and long-term impact

The pressure to quickly reduce emissions, carbon costs and energy costs calls for swift decision-making. However, long-term decarbonisation plans should build on these short-term measures rather than replace them.

Ensuring that short-term actions do not undermine long-term goals is crucial. Systems in use need to be able to manage both current and future requirements, with a setup that is both easy and smooth.

4. Electrification changes industrial processes

Electrification is affecting both steam production and usage, forcing organisations to make decisions to adjust to new steam flows. Primary processes are also changing, adding more complexity to the situation. Steam also remains critical in many plants to ensure safety, always requiring a base level.

While we see direct impact of electrification efforts, future primary processes such as sustainable aviation fuel production are still evolving, with new equipment still under design. This adds further uncertainty to future steam demand.

Managing all this uncertainty while also maintaining safety norms will be a critical challenge for steam grid operators in the future.

5. Flexibilisation is a key prerequisite

With electrification, more and more players are looking at flexibilisation as well. As energy systems become more reliant on variable renewable sources such as wind and solar, demand will also have to play into this as a factor.

This flexibility, coupled with more variable output due to market circumstances, will lead to new, dynamic, optimal points of efficient production. Controlling this will be another transition that the industry needs to face.

Since plants have historically been designed for steady state processes, managing such a transition and the heat generation and the underlying distribution will become critical in the next decade.

Digitalisation is the pathway to low-carbon operation

To eliminate a large portion of the sector’s emissions and run a more efficient operation, industrial companies need to decarbonise industrial steam grids by modernising their control and design approaches and tooling. Ideally, every optimisation initiative should include generation, network and usage.

Steam should be reprioritised to the Plant Manager level given how critical it is becoming for decarbonisation. Operators need to be supported in managing these systems with tools in their core processes.

However, traditional software solutions fail to address the important specifics and complexity of steam systems, unable to handle the introduction of new and often decentralised heat sources inserted into the steam networks.

Only fully digital tools that cover the entire system can manage the complexity of steam. End-to-end tools for steam grids are key enablers in energy decision-making and measuring the impact of steam grid design changes on key performance metrics. Since steam production and distribution are complex processes, a holistic solution is needed to get the full picture.

An example of such an end-to-end technology is a Digital Twin: a digital clone of the entire steam network that combines geographical, meteorological, sensor and other permanent data with physics-based models and AI.

When applied to the industrial steam grid, it enables companies to achieve operational excellence while also facilitating safe and predictable transformative changes. This is especially important since steam is highly complex to model, calling for a combination of sensors, physics-based modelling and live learning for optimisation to bring tangible results.

Digital Twin in a real-world example

The customer was evaluating the optimisation of the dispatch of steam production from multiple boilers using a Digital Twin solution. Operating a combined natural gas & waste-gas (Boiler 1) and natural gas boiler (Boiler 2), the company has historically relied on the natural gas boiler, mostly through fixed set-points.

The dynamic optimisation solution incorporates fuel mix & price, steam quality requirements and boiler efficiencies amongst others. The Digital Twin solution continually computes the most efficient mix of both assets to provide the steam and schedules the dispatch of the boiler accordingly. For this specific timeslot, it suggested to utilise the waste-gas boiler more and include the natural gas boiler only when needed.

An example of this can be seen in the encircled time period, where in the base-case the natural gas boiler would have been used but the optimisation suggests to increase dispatch of the waste boiler. This continuous optimisation throughout the year was valued at approximately EUR 1 million and estimated to reduce CO2 emissions by 4%.

To learn more about the value of Digital Twin solutions to industrial decarbonisation and see more use cases, head over to this page.

[1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/clean-and-efficient-heat-for-industry

[2] Savut, I. (2019). Industrial Heat: Deep Decarbonization Opportunities. Bloomberg New Energy Finance; Global Carbon Project. (2019). Supplemental data of Global Carbon Budget 2019 (Version 1.0 [Data set]. Int. Carbon Obs. Syst.