The Mining Complex which is located North of Quebec, has over 1,000 employees at his site, which comprises an open-pit mine, an ore crusher and a concentrator, huge maintenance workshops, a large parts storage facility and a train loading system.
Average yearly temperature of this location is -3 C.
Mining Complex Overview
The complex (see picture 1) is composed of many buildings heated with steam coils in 700 units distributed in two categories: air make-up and air heaters. The steam is produced at the boiler house in four (4) bunker C oil boilers and 1 electrical boiler. The main steam production (65.5%) is used for buildings heating.
Projects
The implemented solution has consisted of a group of energy reduction measures to optimize the use of the existing air make-up and unit heaters and to lower energy consumption of some processes using steam. This was achieved by the addition of control equipment (valves), condense equipment (steam trap, pump trap, safety drain), sensors and EcoSuite supervisory control server. Thirty-seven (37) new control loops were covered during this exercise.
To ensure recurrent savings on a long term basis, the control approach was designed with EcoSuite real time energy management system to continuously model, track and maintain the lowest possible energy and utility service costs. The EcoSuite system allows to:
- Continuously control energy costs and the minimum achievable benchmarks or good practices for current production and ambient conditions;
- Identify at any time the internal consumers (departments) that are not meeting their prescribed benchmarks;
- For critical parameter, alarms are generated to quickly re-establish the required operating conditions that comply with the desired benchmarks;
- Develop baseline and benchmark (good practice) references;
- Daily HTML report available through LAN/WAN for management.
Sample of the results
This graph represents the average steam consumption (before and after) for one of the area under real time energy management control. A reduction of over 22% was achieved in this particular case.
Steam Consumption (before and after) for a sector under Real Time Energy Management (RTEM)
Reference:
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