Perdaman Industries has outlined efficiency measures it plans to implement at its $3 billion Collie urea manufacturing plant, pointing to a reduction in pollutants as one potential outcome.
Perdaman projects director Joe McCarthy said he believed the company could add value to coal through gasification (the production of syngas from coal).
He said a reduction in pollutants through technology such as that which reduced the level of sulphur before coal was processed was another efficiency outcome of the plant.
“Even the CO2 can be mitigated,” he said, adding that 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced was exported through the product.
“In our case we have integrated the power production into our plant in order to increase efficiency and to lower our cost.”
Mr McCarthy said the plant would generate power, which would be cheaper than buying it off the grid.
The plant is also being designed in order to allow sequestration of what Mr McCarthy described as a “significant portion” of the CO2 not used in the product but said the efficiency outcomes would not be dependent on that.
The project will use 8000 tonnes of coal a day to produce 2 million tonnes a year of urea.
The project is ready to go, according to Mr McCarthy, but has been delayed because of legal issues with coal supplier Griffin, which was acquired by Indian company Lanco late last year.
At the Energy in WA conference, International Energy Agency senior energy adviser Grayson Heffner said the agency had released 25 energy efficiency policy recommendations.
Mr Heffner said energy efficiency could be improved through voluntary agreements between government and the private sector, public-private partnerships, the introduction of obligatory reporting and management laws and industrial self-regulation.
“Industry is often the dominant consumer within a country, industrial energy saving potential is huge,” he said.
He pointed to the example in Victoria, where 20 per cent of the electricity demand comes from one single Alcoa smelter.
But his favourite example of energy efficiency policy potential was in South Africa, where one single consumer, petrochemical company SASOL, was the world’s largest single source of carbon dioxide.
“It’s so big it would rank 45 on the list of national greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
“Quite clearly, when you have end users that are so very large, there is a big opportunity to have an impact by focusing on them.”
