PUMPS, VALVES & ACTUATORS FEATURE HOW NEW TECHNOLOGY FITS WITH THE OLD
Lolli Olafsson, CEO of Geyser Thermal Energy, says it is possible to reuse resources and reduce waste energy using retrofit technology and balancing heating and cooling systems
R
eaders of Process & Control know all about that key priority – getting a
process right for smooth-running production. If you’re not producing, you’re not earning. Keeping everything working is no mean
feat, sometimes leaving little or no time to carry out a proper, holistic review of energy usage and costs. In many cases, the demand and cost on manpower has become too great, whilst the price of traditional energy sources continues to go only one way. According to a designer of thermal
energy and water solutions, there is an increasing demand for help, but how does a busy manufacturer go about finding what is best for them - especially in a crowded renewable energy industry where there seems to be no shortage of claims about saving money? Lolli Olafsson, CEO of Geyser Thermal
Energy is no stranger to that priority of wanting to get a process right – and when he sees heat or water being wasted, he despairs. Which is why you’ll find his company involved in applications such as replacing an old oil-fired boiler with a better, alternative resource that is either untapped, or simply going to waste. “I’m all for renewables,” said Olafsson,
“but when speaking to those in the process and manufacturing industries looking to reduce their carbon footprint and save money on soaring energy bills, I can understand that they’re a bit overwhelmed with possibilities – some of which are based only on results in a laboratory or for new buildings.”
UNDERSTAND EXISTING RESOURCES Olafsson emphasises that his business is all about looking at and understanding what resources a company has -and then working closely together to harness the energy and control it. “Most of the manufacturing sites we
work with are of an age, often with additional buildings that have been bolted on,” he said. “It would be ridiculous and financially
not viable at all to remove all their plant and start from scratch, so to improve energy efficiency it’s a question of making new technology fit in with the old. We often hear that retrofitting isn’t possible or viable, but we’re happy to prove them wrong. Typically, we find that the controls for the different systems of heating and
Balance out the load system so that resources are used, and re-used, as efficiently as possible
cooling are not talking to each other, not integrated, so we would look to balance out the load system so that resources are used as efficiently as possible and often re-used – for example, capturing waste heat at the end of a process and reuse it the following day for the beginning of the next process.” Geyser Thermal Energy often introduce
heat pumps to capture an external resource or boost low grade heat to make it useful and controllable – but at a retrofit installation for a company that produces components for the automotive and rail industries, oil is already being heated to 250˚C and then cooled. Here, Olafsson’s solution to help the company stop wasting huge amounts of heat, has been to balance out the load system between the heating and cooling at the near 30-year-old plant, using heat exchangers to capture the heat from the cooling of the oil and then storing the heat. This can now be used effectively to pre-heat almost everything in the factory from primary to secondary equipment. Interestingly, the same principles apply
with a new Geyser installation for a food manufacturer, where large amounts of heating, cooling and therefore water are required. Controls have been integrated so that they no longer work independently – and for the heating and cooling of water, energy is now economically transferred between the two - without the need for a chiller and a boiler. The hotel and leisure sector is also
benefitting from focussing on reviewing its energy usage. At the Oxfordshire Golf Hotel & Spa, Geyser Thermal Energy have
installed a system that takes water from one of the golf course lakes to use as a heat source, which together with a retrofit of existing plant room systems is eliminating the need for costly and inefficient oil-fired boilers that run at high temperatures. Even though the installation will continue to be fine-tuned for optimum performance, energy costs have already been reduced by one third. Again, this is the supposedly unachievable using retrofit, not new-build.
MANAGING WATER USE “Water usage is also slowly becoming more of an issue for the manufacturing industry to address,” continued Olafsson, “but carbon emissions from it are still overlooked. Having to cool raw materials – across numerous industries – pre- production, during manufacture and post- process requires large volumes of water – and with carbon emissions and the cost of wastewater disposal sometimes double or treble that of water being supplied, there is another huge opportunity for savings and energy recovery and reuse. With both heat/cool/water systems, we typically see an impact on the bottom line from between three to five years; sometimes in as little as 12 months.”
Capturing and storing valuable heat means it can be used for pre- heating purposes
Geyser Thermal Energy E:
info@geyserenergy.co.uk www.geyserenergy.co.uk
PROCESS & CONTROL | OCTOBER 2019 17
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
