Product transport optimisation
Our team in Indonesia optimized its logistics by making one, small adjustment: increasing bulk container deliveries by 1 ton of PTA product per journey. This small change reduced truck deliveries by over 1,000 trips per year and CO2 emissions by 375 tons per year.
Some of these containers are lined with polyethene, reducing the number of journeys also enabled the team to reduce plastic use too.
The business complies with national ODOL (Over Dimension, Over Load) transportation regulations relating to vehicles that exceed legal size and weight limits).
Upgrading HVACs
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a crucial role in manufacturing, such as maintaining the required temperature levels for various processes, controlling humidity levels to prevent unwanted reactions and managing the air quality to ensure a clean environment for employees and the processes. Our plant in Merak, Indonesia, has five HVACs that perform these important functions in different buildings. Refrigerants are essential components in the HVAC systems, particularly in the cooling and refrigeration processes.
By both updating all five HVACs and switching to new refrigerants, the plant benefits from more modern equipment and more efficient consumption, reducing both electricity use and CO2 emissions.
Liquid fuel substitution
The Merak plant’s furnaces were originally designed to use high-speed diesel (HSD) as the main fuel in the burners. Furnaces are used to supply energy to produce high-pressure steam and maintain hot oil temperature, which is an essential part of PTA production. Hot oil, also known as heat transfer fluid, is a specialized fluid used to transfer heat. Over the years, the Merak team has found new ways to reduce the consumption of HSD as the main fuel in its burners:
- Substituting the furnaces’ main fuel with natural gas, which has reduced emissions
- Further maximizing natural gas and biogas usage through mixing and using available space in the furnace’s biogas burner
- Successfully decommissioning its waste incinerator, which finally eliminated the use of HSD in the plant’s production processes
These actions reduced emissions by 215 tons per year.
Water Optimization
Desalination plants play a vital role in manufacturing, removing salt and other impurities from sea water to provide a reliable, sustainable source of ultra-pure water needed for production processes, cooling and heating systems, and as a feedstock for chemical reactions. The Merak team has taken steps to minimise the desal discharge (the water that remains after the sea water is desalinated) by optimising the amount of water its desalination plant produces, reducing desal water/T-PTA consumption by 9% .
Other related optimization actions include:
- By optimizing the operation of desalination deaerator and hot blowdown phase of the desalination plant, the team reduced the use of sea water in the desalination system by 19% in 2024 compared to 2023. The desalination deaerator dissolves gases from the water and the hot blowdown phase removes hot liquid or vapor from the system to reduce pressure and remove contaminants
- By optimizing the operation of the BHS rotary pressure filter, which separates solids from liquids in high solids slurries, the team reduced the use of the fresh, high purity demineralized water (or ‘demin water’) that ensures the quality of the final product by 7%
Despite some other seawater usage also increasing due to higher production rates, the above improvements reduced overall seawater.
