Challenges to improve SSCM in Linde group

Listen to this article

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As per The Linde group (2018), one of the key challenges Linde Group faced was to avoid CO₂ at the customer’s plants and in Linde AG’s plants.

Every day around 1,500 tonnes of CO₂ waste gas as an industrial raw material are recycled — One of the major ecological challenges around the world is towards de-carbonisation. One of the strategies Linde Ag pursued was to construct the largest CO₂purifier and liquefier plant in the world for the petrochemical group Jubail United Petrochemical Company. The plant was operating at its full capacity from 2017, demonstrating the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and utilization (CCU) to make an ecological sense and attractive from an economic perspective. CO₂ is separated from the CCU plant before it is released in the atmosphere and purified so that in the production of methanol and urea it can be used as an industrial raw material. The CO₂ is recycled from two ethylene factories where it is a bi-product of the oxidation of ethylene and oxygen. 200 tonnes of liquefied food quality CO₂ are produced per day which gets transported to food and drink manufacturers.
Every hour around 300 cubic meters of contaminated water is cleaned — One of the vital resources is to have clean water. The industrial wastewater is treated with CO₂ in SOLVOCARB venturi which is a very efficient process for treating wastewater. The operational safety at the plant is also increased by the Linde process and thereby the cost is reduced. The use of CO₂ helped in avoiding damages to pipes and the maintenance costs are also reduced.
Avoiding CO₂ emissions- A range of efficiency can be measured by reducing global CO₂ emissions by operating our HyCO and air separation plants by 2020. To implement this step, an air separation plant was overhauled in Ningbo, China in 2017. In order to have more efficient use of energy, an entire plant was reconditioned where the filters and pipes are being cleaned in the seawater cooling systems, and on a regular basis, it was serviced. The focus was not just optimizing the performance but also reducing the energy requirement which helped in reducing the cost by saving up to 600,000EUR for the operator of the plant and around 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year.