Time is up for fossil fuels in spray drying

A very warm welcome to this webinar. My name is Stig Møller Andersen and I'm Product Manager for dairy drying at GEA. Time is up for fossil fuel in spray drying, and we're here to tell you how you can already today begin a very important leap towards a significant reduction in the CO2 emission of your spray dryer. Before we go into the more details of it, let me share some practicalities for you during this webinar. One first thing that I need to say is that the slides that we are about to show you, they will be available for download so you can put them on your computer and share with your colleagues later. The same goes actually with the recording of this webinar where we are doing the talking and so on, that is going to be as well available for everyone after this webinar for sharing. This webinar will include as well a Q&A session and we do encourage you when a question pops up to use the chat function and write in the question. After the actual talking here we will look into the questions, and we hope to answer all of them, and if we don't have time enough, we are going to send you the answers afterwards in an email. I'm joined here with my colleague. I'm Riccardo Bergamini and I’m Energy Specialist at GEA. Perfect. The agenda for this webinar is three things. We will take you through the technical details of a new solution that can cut the CO2 emission as said with 50% of your current level. We'll tell you something about that on the technical side, but as well we will include some very important parameters in the economical side. Essentially does it pay off? The last thing is that we will take you through some details about the moment in time. When is the right moment to invest in a sustainability solution that will cut the dependency on fossil fuel? We will of course say, Riccardo and me, we will say always but anyway we can say that there are some really really special, you could say, examples where it could be in particular a very good idea to go for this new solution. But first things first, we will take you through the storyline of this is essentially yesterday, today and tomorrow. We'll begin with a walkthrough of the you could say principal energy design of a spray dryer and the resulting CO2 emission. We'll tell you about how that has been improved in recent years and how this thing that we are presenting today is a really a significant further additional improvement to this. So, to begin with we have a spray dryer here drawn just like a box and Riccardo could you take the audience through the principal energy design considerations of this? Sure, a spray dryer produces powder by evaporating water from a concentrated product. The evaporation process is driven by warm air that is taken from ambient and heated up by means of fossil fuel driven heaters. Most of the air comes in from a single stream that is called main air and this is heated up from ambient as I said to around 200 degrees by means of fossil fuel driven heaters that can be steam heaters as indicated here or in-direct gas heaters or even direct gas heaters. There are also other air streams, multiple of them, that are minor in entity and also in energy use but they also have to be heated up from ambient conditions to around 60-100 degrees, again with fossil fuel driven heaters. Then all this air is rejected from the dryer in warm conditions around 70 degrees, and as humid air, and this is where all the energy that, or most of the energy that we use inside the dryer, is then rejected and wasted in the ambient. If we look at the energy balance around this box, well if we take a dryer as indicated here that can produce 6-7 tons per hour of powder, this would require around 719 cubic meters per hour of fossil fuel, of natural gas in this case, and around 550 kilowatt of electricity for running auxiliary equipment, mostly fans and pumps. This would result, all in all, in around 10,000 tons per year of CO2 emissions. Okay, 10,000 tons that sounds like a value that - well do you think we could quantify it in a less engineering manner? Yeah, if you think that a flight from Europe to eastern coast of the US takes one ton per passenger in economy class then you can see that this is equivalent to around 5,000 return tickets from Europe to the US per year. So that's really something, I mean imagine if I had to travel, I'm in Copenhagen now to New York 5,000 times per year then I would be guilty of the same CO2 emission as this spray dryer. Yeah, this is significant and there are many spray dryers in the world. That's really something. One last question, we have some spray drying design here - 200 degrees into the spray dryer is that always like that? No, this can vary depending on the product. When we talk about dairy and food products we can have a variation between around 180 degrees to around 230 degrees here, and talking about the exhaust air that can be released from around 60 degrees to around 80 degrees. Yeah, okay so it's really one example that we're showing here not a bad example, but one example. Correct. Perfect. Then what's the present status? Well, as I said already today, this was a solution that was traditional in the past. Already today some advancements have been done and they are basically concerning one specific solution to recover heat from all the waste heat that you have in the exhaust air. So, to do so it's today pretty common to place a heat exchanger in the exhaust air duct, and by means of this we can cool down partly the exhaust air by warming up a water stream to around 60 degrees, in this case, for allowing some temperature difference between the warm air and the water. This water is taken to the inlet of the main air stream and can preheat the main air before the existing traditional conventional fossil fuel driven heater. In this case we can heat it up to around 50 degrees, and then the water is sent back to the exhaust heat exchanger. Overall, this saves around 20 percent of the fossil fuel consumption so if we look again at what would this mean in energy terms, this dryer would now consume around 585 normal cubic meters of natural gas. The electricity consumption is still the same because we haven't touched any auxiliary equipment, but the CO2 emissions are also cut by 20 percent so they are now down to 8,000 tons per year. So, me traveling across the Atlantic not 5,000 times per Year, but only 4,000 times per year. Yes. It's nice but it doesn't really bring us anywhere substantially, I think. And the thing is that what we are working with at GEA is at least two things. The first thing is the core competences that we have within spray drying. That's really something that we do, and we know exactly how to design and install and commission and operate such a plant here, but very important a second cornerstone of our knowledge base is heat pumps. We know how to manufacture them, we know how to design what happens inside them, and this is very very important to know because what we are doing right now is essentially that we are merging those two technologies here, we integrate the heat pump into the spray drying process allowing for really a leap forward, and I think that's what is really important here, and Ricardo can you take us through, based on the drawing of tomorrow, what the future will bring? Yeah, so as I said before with this solution that you see here, which is what is now established, we hit our maximum heat recovery we could achieve by passive systems, but if we want to reduce further the natural gas consumption, then we need to preheat this air further from the 50 degrees that you see here, and so we need definitely another heat exchanger there, and we need a new means of heating that air and this is AddCool® so the heat pump that we integrate here. By means of this heat pump we can produce water at up to 130 degrees that is sent to this heat exchanger, heating up the air to 120 degrees this further reduces the load of the existing fossil fuel driven heat exchanger, but we need some energy to drive the AddCool®, the heat pump, and this energy comes in form partly of low temperature waste heat and partly electricity. The waste heat is taken from in form of warm water that can come from different places in the plant, it could come from a second heat exchanger that we can place in the exhaust air to further recover heat from there heating up this water, and then sending it to the AddCool®. It can come from a condensate from the evaporators placed prior to the spray dryer it could come even from the ice water network. And this water can be cooled down to two degrees, if necessary, and then we need also electricity as I said before. Overall, if we look again at what it means in in terms of energy, with this solution we can cut to 50 percent the natural gas consumption and the CO2 emissions, so in this case we would have around 316 or normal cubic meters per hour of natural gas used, we would have higher electricity consumption because we need electricity to drive the heat pump, but we cut significantly CO2 emissions, now down to 5 000 tons per year. So just in my non-engineering Units, I'm traveling not 5 000 times, not 4 000 times, but only 2 500 times per year across the Atlantic? Yes. All right that's at least a very very good leap forward, I think. Two questions that I have, that I think that that many people are having is first this 120, it seems from a an energy point of view that it could be a very good idea to have not 120 but something higher, why don't we have that? Yeah, that's a legitimate thought and it's also what we think. The 120 right now is a technological limit of the highest temperature we can reach with commercially available and proven high temperature heat pump technologies, but surely, we are working on pushing this limit further, and we can expect in the future to have a second heat pump or other devices that will heat up the air further, getting rid completely of the traditional fossil fuel driven heater. Ah, so essentially what we foresee in the future, that we don't have now, is something else than steam here that will take the temperature from the 120 to what is required for the spray drying? Yes. Perfect. The last question on this slide is the the two degree that's ice water that's really something that our customers are actually spending a lot of electricity to produce, and here they get it as well, I think there's a saving there? Yeah, that's a very good point Stig, thank you for bringing it up, and as you say, we can produce ice water there and in this way, we can achieve a double benefit of heating up and saving on the heating side, so in natural gas and also cooling down in a useful way on the cold side of the heat pump, so reducing the load of existing chillers and saving in electricity also there. Everybody wins. Everybody wins. What we have done at GEA is that we already have this this solution installed at our test center, we have a test center in Copenhagen, actually the world's largest test center of its kind, where we have the multistage dryer that we have there, we have installed the AddCool® there, and I was passing by the the manager Thomas Willum Jensen and asked him what his experience is owning and operating the AddCool®, and what did he experience during the installation of the AddCool®, and here's what he said. My experience with AddCool® that we have here at the test center in Søborg Copenhagen, at the GEA test center, is that now we have had it for more or less one year, and what we can see is that we are more or less saving half of the gas we were using previously, when we were spray drying the powders on our MSD® multistage dryer, MSD®20, so from using fossil fuels we can now reduce that part to half of what we were using before. So now we are using energy by electricity and we are saving quite a lot of money, because for every kilowatt we put into this unit here, we are getting more or less four out. Our experience with installing this one here on this existing installation, our MSD®20, has been a little bit of a challenge due to the the space we had available for it, so we have installed it with a shoehorn here in our in our service room on the top of the dryer, but it has been possible, no doubt about that, the electrical and control installation or integration into the plant has been fairly easy, so after it was installed mechanically, it has been a fairly easy unit to operate. On a new plant, a new installation, it will be very very easy to integrate but on old plants, it is also possible it just need a little bit more engineering. And Thomas he asked me to convey as well, one thing that he forgot when we talked together, he said that everybody interested in the in the heat pump installation or the MSD® dryer the multistage dryer or any other thing at the test center, please send him an email or send Riccardo or me an email, and we will be happy to facilitate that you can pop by in Copenhagen. Next up Riccardo is the business case, there's no free lunch, nothing comes for free, this installation has a certain cost, it has some benefits as well. What can we say in general about the saleability you could say about this product, does it pay off? Yeah, as you will say this comes with a cost, and you can expect a higher investment cost compared to conventional fossil fuel driven heating systems, but at the same time, it generates quite substantial operational cost savings and these are mostly in the form of reduction in cost for energy use. So, as we said before this device can save on natural gas substituting it with some consumption of Electricity, and energy wise you would use much less energy in form of electricity compared to the energy you are using today in form of natural gas. But the operational cost saving come also from depending on the price you're paying today for natural gas, and the price you pay today for electricity, so’it's impossible to say a priori that this has a specific fixed payback time for every customer, every customer would have a different one, but we can definitely see that payback times are assessed in around three to five years for many of our customers. Okay, on top of that I might add, that there are also many countries giving subsidies for this kind of green technology, and this can reduce quite substantially at times the investment cost. I talk just about energy prices because regarding maintenance, this solution really doesn't require much in terms of cost and in terms of activities, so it's really limited to one time per year, checking the level of oil and the level of refrigerant in the machine, similarly to what all our customers are experiencing with their chillers that they have already installed in there. So, it should be regarded as a utility? Yes. Perfect . Can we be more specific, or I think we can, in terms of when is really a good time to invest in AddCool® as said earlier, we really think that everybody should invest of course, but when is it in particular a perfect time, moment in time, of going into those investments here, can we elaborate a bit more on that? Yeah, I think there are three main drivers that say okay this is the right time, so if you're experiencing high fossil fuel prices, I think you should call us and check if AddCool® is a good solution for you, because for you it's probably going to have a low payback time to invest in this. A second thing is that if you are considering an upgrade in your plant, then you should give us a call, and check this out, because overall if this is appealing for you it would further reduce the investment cost, and the third thing, if you have ambitious sustainability targets in terms of CO2 emission reduction, give us a call because this is really as you saw a game changer in terms of energy use in spray drying worldwide. Exactly, so the question is, let's be a little bit bold and say: Are you AddCool® ready? I think most people are to some degree AddCool® ready and we have actually, as a part of this webinar, we have put in a little gift for you, because what is going to pop up on your screen after the Q&A session, that we will have shortly, is a suitability survey where we ask you to fill in five very very simple questions, and that will allow us to receive those questions. We will examine them and then we'll find out, whether we should really fastly call you in order to have an agreement of what to do next, and here we have an arrow here showing something. Ricardo can you take the audience through, how we would see the steps from today until the reduction of CO2 as we are promising? Yeah, we call this a journey because we really want to be close to you, side by side, working towards a more sustainable production in the future and for this we have some steps in this journey after receiving the suitability survey. Then we will call you for an introduction Meeting, this can be done online with no problems, and in this which will last around one hour, we would discover what are your needs today, and see what's the best solution for you in the future, if there is potential, if you need such a solution. We will then ask you to collect some data and send it to us. This is an easy step, and it can take up to one day, let's say, in collecting this and send it to us by means of which, we will conduct some analysis and come up with different solutions, not only AddCool® also others that can benefit you depending on the needs we discovered before, and we will prepare a presentation showing these solutions, the savings you can achieve, and the budgetary payback time you can expect, and this will lead to a second workshop of around two hours again, a call or a physical meeting, where we would discuss these solutions, and select one that we mutually believe that is the best for you. This will lead then to a site visit to see, to check out in your plant, how is the layout and where we can potentially install equipment, and then in a matter of one month you will receive a proposal, a formal proposal, that if you sign then will lead to the reduction in CO2 emissions. In around 40 weeks you can expect to have a solution installed, and if it's AddCool® then it is a 50 percent reduction as we said before. All in all, this will take less than one year from the moment in which you fill today the suitability survey to when you have your reduction in CO2 emissions. So essentially, now it's October 22, so by October 23 you're much better off and the question is, or what I want to say, is just to close this now, we have presented you a very tangible opportunity to cut your CO2 emissions to half of what you have today, we are proposing it with a proven technology that works, that is very easy to integrate, we call it AddCool® and we'll go straight to the Q&A session so don't run away.