Editorial: Making RAPID Gains in Energy Efficiency

In a 2012 report, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) examined energy-efficiency opportunities looking forward to 2050 and found that energy efficiency could reduce projected 2050 U.S. energy use by 40–60%. Achieving those reductions would require implementation of a wide variety of advanced technologies and infrastructure improvements throughout the industrial, transportation, commercial, and residential sectors.

The report noted that future energy-efficiency opportunities in industry would “come less from seeking out individual sources of waste and more from optimization of complex systems enabled by advances in information, communication, and computational infrastructure. Most of the energy use in industry is in processes, not individual equipment, so improving processes represents the largest opportunity for energy intensity improvements.”

Neal Elliott, senior director for research at ACEEE and one of the report’s authors, said that “the largest savings opportunities are likely to involve systemic changes, such as: recycled feedstocks and materials substitution; new processes that transform what we manufacture and how we make those materials; smart manufacturing with advanced sensors and controls; and supply chain integration.”

Last month, ACEEE looked at the progress that has been made over the last five years, and concluded that even though “in recent years energy use has been stable, reversing historical growth … if we want actual declines in energy use, we need to redouble our efforts.”

Process intensification (PI) should be part of that redoubling. PI involves technologies that replace large, expensive, energy-intensive equipment or processes with ones that are smaller, cleaner, less costly, and more efficient, or modules that combine multiple operations into fewer devices or a single apparatus. Examples include compact heat exchangers, static mixers, microchannel reactors, hybrid separation operations such as reactive distillation and reactive evaporation, dividing-wall distillation columns, among others. PI is not a new concept; some of these technologies have been in commercial use for years or even decades.

However, companies are generally reluctant to be the first to adopt new technologies, and despite its promise, PI has not been widely deployed. A 2014 PI workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) identified several barriers to implementation of PI technologies, including the lack of a unified framework for identifying and evaluating PI opportunities and the design of intensified processes. Also noted was the lack of a well-established forum where industry and academia can identify existing needs, validate solution concepts, and define future research directions.

Those barriers are about to fall. Last month, the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) named AIChE to lead the new Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment (RAPID) Manufacturing Institute. With federal funding and cost shares from more than 130 industry, academic, government, and nongovernmental partners totaling more than $140 million, RAPID will focus on developing breakthrough modular chemical PI (MCPI) technologies that boost domestic energy productivity and efficiency, cut operating costs, and reduce waste. For more on RAPID, see p. 60 and p. 62, or visit processintensification.org. RAPID will ensure that chemical engineers are at the center of energy-reducing process improvements.