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The threat of climate change is growing bigger every year, but limiting global warming within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels can avoid the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate change.

Global GHG emissions are currently at about 33 gigatons of CO2e, as per IEA report. These emissions are due to a combination of input energy and process emissions (chemical or thermal) which generates Co2 emissions in the environment from key sectors like chemicals, cement, and metals.

Limiting global warming will require major transition in these “hard to abate” Industries which involves substantial reduction in fossil fuel use, widespread process electrification, improved energy efficiency, and increased use of alternative fuels.

Also, there is a huge data gap between the shopfloor and the supervisors due to the unavailability of a unified system that detects and monitors critical energy parameters intuitively and measures end to end CO2 emissions as part of Scope 1 and 2.

There is a need for large upfront investments to replace fossil fuels and this fundamental shift from conventional processes to new technologies would not be an easy transition.

Hence, we need a holistic and long-term strategy with comprehensive energy balance to address the carbon lock-in problem.

Digital technology to drive the next-generation carbon neutral operations

Accomplishing a low carbon operation will require highly efficient operations to reduce energy losses, optimise the thermal efficiency, and reduce the wastage of materials. Carbon neutrality would require achieving a trade-off between carbon emissions and carbon sinks through a combination of deep decarbonisation and carbon sequestration technologies.

The Emerging Technologies would play a key role to optimise efficiency, utilisation of resources, and improve yield to accelerate towards renewable, decarbonisation, and carbon-negative initiatives across the globe.

AI & Digital Twins will play a key role in driving the future of sustainable manufacturing and building the foundation for an efficient, connected, and sustainable “factory of future”.

For example, the petrochemical industry accounts for 6 percent of energy usage on average and about half of it comes primarily from oil and natural gas. It is estimated that 60 percent of energy consumption of the total plant is in furnaces.

Optimising furnace operations in terms of reduced energy intensity will improve overall energy cost to the petrochemical plant and also reduce the carbon footprint of the plant operations.

The value chain requires a holistic AI Strategy that can expand across energy optimisation across the furnaces to the downstream operations and taking into account the throughput across the value chain.

Even 1 percent reduction in energy intensity of the operations by real-time optimisation of operations would reduce CO2 equivalent emissions by around ~ 5 billion pounds annually.

LivNSense building the path for future of carbon neutral operations

LivNSense has taken up an ambitious mission to impact “100 Mega Tons of GHG emissions across each of the Energy Intensive Industries with the world’s first Green-AI platform, GreenOps™.

GreenOps™ unlocks industrial resources efficiency through its Edge to Cloud distributed intelligence. GreenOps™ provides an ability to deliver deep insights across process value chain from R&D, Production, Maintenance to QA to derive the complete assessment of a company’s holistic carbon footprint and abatement strategy.

• The platform acquires batch and streaming data from heterogeneous systems in a typical manufacturing environment with plug-n-play-based messaging layer and robust data crunching capabilities [called SmartEdge4.0].
• The low latency, high volume data being analysed in real time at the Edge with GreenOps AI Models (IPs) with continuously learning Physics & Chemistry Based Models in Cloud. It harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twins Metaverse with its innovative “Energy Balance” proposition to reduce carbon emission.
• The Digital Twins Metaverse measures, tracks, and optimises CO2 emissions in real time. It also enables the ability to simulate and identify the optimal process parameters to optimise energy losses and reduce CO2.

The unique innovation is “Energy Balance” technology that provides a holistic Co2e impact across electrical energy, combustion, and chemical processes for “hard to abate” industries.

While organisations are adopting Industry 4.0 as part of their manufacturing initiatives, we’ve realised the industry is still at the infancy stage with lots of gaps in the value chain and a lot more needs to be done on achieving de-carbonisation.

Our focus on reducing CO2e from multiple sectors and transforming the companies to achieve net zero carbon while impacting the bottom line has been one of the key growth drivers.

The future forward

Our holistic focus of not only the industrial machinery and assets but the people working around in that environment as well (including vendors and suppliers) has been able to impact the complete process value chain to benefit from the change.

The key industry segment driving the growth are heavy machineries (automotive), chemicals, petro-chemicals, metals, and life sciences. Our key focus in chemical and high energy industries are paying off.

Our ability to integrate with third party platforms has enabled Green-AI as a service model which is the key difference in growth of “partners”-led growth strategy.

Our incubation with NetApp Excellerator Program has been of immense value. NetApp’s approach especially for high volume data management – storage to optimisation and costs optimisation tools for hybrid data management practices has been adding value to our journey. This is important especially from a carbon offset perspective to keep our platform and infrastructure Co2e at the lowest level.

Fossil fuels will still be feedstocks in a zero-carbon world. Our solution has a unique advantage for long-term play even after process electrification and green hydrogen technologies are commercialised. GreenOps™ would integrate into these technologies in future as a “full stack decarbonisation” platform for comprehensive “energy balance” across electrical energy, combustion, and chemical process emissions.