Manufacturing and production businesses that deploy integrated digital technologies will be best placed to navigate today’s complex supply chains, close the data gap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and attract and retain the workforce of the future, as Gino Hernandez, Head of Global Digital Business for ABB Energy Industries, explains.
Heavy, asset-intensive industries today face the challenge of balancing the urgent need to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions, in line with sustainability targets, while optimizing production and profitability
Energy accounts for more than three-quarters of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, so reducing Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions along the length of the supply chain is a priority for all energy producers and suppliers. Not only does it drive more sustainable operations, but it enables them to comply with evolving environmental legislation, protect their reputation and license to operate, and attract and retain the next generation of talent.
The digital revolution
Digitalization – the application of strategies and solutions across process automation, data analytics and remote technologies – is the key to unlocking business value. Armed with innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things and Big Data, operators can seamlessly integrate renewables from the grid. This drives scale and brings the cost curve down on new, clean energy sources, and decarbonization technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen.
Companies that digitally connect and share knowledge with original equipment manufacturers, clients and suppliers will be in a stronger position to navigate today’s complex value chains and reduce GHGs. Having the right tools and expertise to deliver more effective, centralized data is key, allowing businesses to link multiple applications together to enable integrated operations, industrial intelligence, and monitoring and reporting.
Data: a challenge and opportunity
Consider this: the average plant uses only 20 percent of the data it generates, an astonishing statistic given that data is the lifeblood of modern industry. However, the idea that simply pooling data and then applying AI will automatically provide actionable insights is flawed. After all, not all information is useful information: what is required is a conceptual understanding of how the data got in that pool, and, most importantly, how it can best be applied to improve efficiency and sustainability.
Data is nothing without context. A gap exists between quantity and quality, whereby businesses are generating data but lack the knowledge or digital tools to cherry pick the most useful, analyze it and then apply it. Data can also be complicated due to its shelf life; if it isn’t used in a timely manner, its insights grow less valuable. In both these instances, automated workflows can help contextualize and interpret the blizzard of operational data captured from industrial processes.
Generative AI (GenAI), for example, has proven to reduce industrial and GHG emissions by up to 20 percent and deliver savings of up to 25 percent through energy optimization.
By applying ABB’s energy management optimization system (EMOS), which monitors, forecasts and optimizes energy consumption and supply, ABB helped one customer save £1m and 13,000 tons of emissions a year, by making data-driven decisions.
The competition for talent
Attracting and retaining the next generation of digitally literate talent – young people who can work in harmony with innovations like AI, not in spite of them – is crucial. That said, the huge archive of knowledge acquired by veteran employees must not be allowed to exit with them when they retire.
The digital transition must therefore be supported by the transformation of processes and people. In addition to training and upskilling, businesses need to establish succession plans to ensure that the existing expertise within the operation is successfully integrated with new skillsets and perspectives from Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Again, this is where digital can help. GenAI has the potential to add real business value by increasing workforce capacity and capability by factors of hundreds as part of a transition strategy and skills evolution.
Integrating new, sustainable energy sources
For the past 10 years, ABB and Imperial College London have been developing a dedicated carbon capture pilot plant – the only facility of its kind in the world – with the latest control technology and equipment to train the engineers of the future in carbon capture. ABB is working on digital twin track and trace technology, which uses surface and subsurface modelling and simulations to visualize and optimize carbon from the point of source to the point of injection, to ensure safe and sustainable operations.
In the emerging green hydrogen market, ABB is partnering with IBM and Worley on an integrated digital solution for facility owners to build assets more quickly, cheaply and safely, and operate them more efficiently. Meanwhile, ABB and Canadian company Hydrogen Optimized are advancing the deployment of large-scale green hydrogen production systems to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries such as metals, cement, utilities, ammonia, fertilizers and fuels.
These projects are all committed to unlocking the potential of digital technologies across the energy value chain, giving heavy industries vital tools to future-proof their businesses by reducing their carbon footprint while maximizing production and profits.
- Digital Strategy
