In 2014, a 14-year-old student in Pennsylvania published a peer-reviewed paper which proposed that simply by changing from the Times New Roman font to a more ink-efficient font called Garamond, the U.S. government could save up to $136 million per year in toner. Suvir Mirchandani's paper, published in the Journal of Emerging Investigators, is a great example of how sometimes a small change can have a rather profound effect.
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Father and son on a camping trip fishing by a lake
A new reality
Oil refineries and chemical producers find themselves under increasing pressure to find cost-cutting measures that, at the same time, address important environmental and social needs. Fortunately, the sentiment that somehow the implementation of more sustainable technologies will negatively impact financial performance is increasingly outdated.
So why has environmental, social and governance (ESG) suddenly become so important to investors? According to Robert Eccles and Svetlana Klimenko of the Harvard Business Review (May 2019), there are six drivers behind this trend: investment firm size, financial returns, growing demand, evolved fiduciary responsibility, a philosophical trickle-down effect and investor activism.
In the November 2014 issue of Management Science, Eccles and others assert that firms have essentially become "too big to let the planet fail" -- unable to hedge against system-level threats like climate change. Among many such studies, one by Khan and others in November 2016's The Accounting Review shows funds that implemented ESG strategies in the '90s have clearly outperformed those that didn't.
In addition to demonstrable financial incentives, the change is being driven by investors. In a 2017 Globes article, UBS Global Head of Sustainable Investing Rina Kupferschmid-Rojas said, "New investors we meet, 90 percent of them, are seeking investments with social and environmental value. This is going to be the trend in the portfolios we will manage over the next 10-15 years." More recently, UBS Chairman of the Board Axel Weber said, "We want to be the preferred provider of financial services to clients for whom sustainability is important ⦠last year, clients increased their sustainable investments by over 56 percent, to nearly $490 billion."
There has clearly been a shift in the way the industry must consider ESG in its approach to investment. According to the 2019 UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative Final Report, "the fiduciary duties of investors require them to incorporate ESG issues into investment analysis and decision-making processes, consistent with their investment time horizons, and encourage high standards of ESG performance in the companies or other entities in which they invest."
Finally, shareholder activist organizations like "Follow This" have been leading the revolution at a "cashroots level." By introducing shareholder resolutions aimed at gaining commitment to environmental targets with companies like Shell, BP, Equinor, ExxonMobil and Chevron, organizer Mark Van Baal, in an interview with Amanpour and Company, said that he hopes fossil fuel producers can become the "ones to lead us into the energy future and stop climate change."
Better cleaning: Improved ESG and profits
Why are we, an industrial cleaning company, talking about ESG? Because it's important to us -- not only in how we build safe and ecologically sound facilities, treat our employees and manage the business, but because we know it's equally important to our clients and the world. For the past 50-plus years, heat exchanger cleaning has been done on washpads using hydroblasting alone. We believe a small change in how cleaning is done can have a big impact on a plant's bottom line while at the same time providing significant benefits that align well with our clients' ESG-focused development strategies.
Butterflies: The environmental impact of better cleaning
The industry has tacitly accepted that hydroblasting cannot clean the shellside of a heat exchanger bundle to 100 percent. Even in fouling service bundles with ample cleaning lanes, physics prevents the entire OD surface from ever being fully cleaned. In the worst case, we've seen exchangers returned to service after hydroblasting with less than 70 percent of the surface area properly cleaned because no reasonable amount of shell-side hydroblasting can ever be completely effective. The environmental impact of this "good enough" approach comes in the form of increased greenhouse gas emissions from the increased heat input required to overcome poorly "cleaned" exchanger performance.
Hydroblasting alone uses an obscene amount of water. Typical ID/OD hydroblasting uses between 250,000-1 million gallons of clean water per heat exchanger.
At Clean As New, "good enough" is never good enough. Not only does Tech Sonic's ultrasonic technology provide guaranteed, near perfect cleaning, it reduces the water consumption per heat exchanger to less than 5,000 gallons -- a reduction of more than 95 percent. A conservative estimate suggests that for a mid-sized refinery, the Clean As New approach would save more than 200 million gallons of water per year.
Bandages: The safety impact of better cleaning
Our facilities completely eliminate the risks associated with hydroblasting. We've designed the building, processes and automation to ensure that workers are never exposed to any risk of hydraulic failure or accidental injection. All high-pressure equipment is physically isolated, and workers are electronically locked out of operating zones, with all operations performed 100-percent remotely.
Bottom lines: The economic impact of better cleaning
The drive to more sustainable manufacturing must be accompanied by improved economic performance. A Clean As New facility allows refiners and chemical producers to reduce their overall cleaning costs, while at the same time improving efficiency and reducing downtime. The economic impact can be significant. In a paper presented at the 2019 Heat Exchanger Fouling and Cleaning Conference, Carlos Henrique Schulz of Braskem detailed how cleaning a single heat exchanger at the company's plant in Camaçari, Brazil, using Tech Sonic's technology resulted in savings in excess of $1.5 million in a single year.
Get your free cleaning facility today
Clean As New's business model is simple: Our clients pay for cleaning, and if we can't clean it, they don't pay. That extends to our offer to replace their existing washpad with a customized facility, just outside their fenceline (off-site). For clients who want to reap the full benefits of "CLEANER, FASTER, SAFER and GREENER" cleaning, we will design, build and operate a facility under a suitable cleaning contract at no cost to the client.
For more information and to join Clean As New in a free measured trial, visit www.cleanasnew.com or call (832) 271-2666.