I wanted to share a post of how higher energy prices are causing North American refineries to take another look at some of their energy intensive units such as fired heaters. The situation:

In many plants, these units were built 10-15 years ago or more. Most were built in times when natural gas was extremely inexpensive. There was little need for energy efficient designs—so even today they consume energy at higher rates than they could.

Higher energy prices have made financial justification efforts for efficiency projects  easier.

The bad news of higher energy prices is leading to the good news of refiners and petrochemical manufacturers spending capital to make their processes more efficient. With the ever increasing power of microprocessors, sophisticated advanced control applications like model predictive control are now embedded in the plant automation controllers to provide better process control performance than was possible with loop-by-loop control.

These investments in energy efficiency provide ongoing savings for the process manufacturers are but one action in lowering overall energy demand.