Building Trust in Industrial Clusters

Yokogawa has been involved in projects in several industrial clusters throughout the world. One of the highlight cases is in the port of Rotterdam located in the Netherlands, the largest seaport in Europe. The collaboration between Yokogawa and the Port of Rotterdam Authority (PoR) serves as a fascinating example of industrial clustering and synergy generation. PoR hosts a vast industrial complex that includes refineries, chemical plants, and biofuel refineries. Increased integration within PoR could allow for more efficient use of resources such as power, raw materials, industrial gases, heat, and steam, as well as treatment of wastewater. This collaboration could drive significant efficiency and profitability for the companies involved.

Industrial complex in the port of Rotterdam (Photo courtesy of Port of Rotterdam Authority)

 

PoR’s Initiatives for a Transformation in Sustainability

Looking ahead, PoR aims to become a CO2-neutral and increasingly circular port by 2050. Process plants currently contribute to a large part of the cluster’s total CO2 emissions. Therefore, PoR is actively supporting numerous projects and initiatives to help reduce these emissions. For example, this ranges from stimulating the adoption of a more diverse mix of sustainable raw materials in the production of various products, to fostering collaboration across multiple companies within industrial clusters. These efforts are intended to lead to a large-scale transformation in energy and chemical processes, driven by the increasing adoption of digital technologies and the setting of ambitious sustainability goals.
With this transformation in sustainability, Yokogawa believes that PoR and many other industrial clusters are transforming into increasingly networked systems, which drives increasing system of systems (SoS) behavior as they progress toward their sustainability goals while maintaining a competitive advantage.  

 

Feasibility Study for Integration 

In September 2023, the Port of Rotterdam Authority and Yokogawa initiated a feasibility study into increasing the integration across several plants to efficiently use energy and utilities in the PoR industrial cluster to contribute to ambitious regional decarbonization goals. A first scan showed that optimizing electricity and utilities across companies could yield as high as 5% cost savings.

Individual companies in the industry have generally highly optimized their own operations. However, concerns about exposing confidential information often hamper them from looking ‘beyond the fence’ to work with other companies in an industrial cluster, even though this can yield further energy and resource savings. Port of Rotterdam and Yokogawa are looking to facilitate the confidential sharing of data and deeper integration within the industrial cluster to unlock the significant potential efficiency gains of optimizing production across the industrial cluster.

 

Pilot Phase

Based on the results of the feasibility study, PoR, Yokogawa, KBC, and Distro Energy are now launching a pilot at scale for one year with companies in the port industrial cluster. Up to six companies and two grid operators are participating in the pilot. Yokogawa has already worked with some of these companies for years, and has established trust in that role. With this trust evolving from within a company to across companies, Yokogawa is emerging as a trusted partner in the integrated environment of the industrial cluster.

The companies’ energy related data will be used to set up an orchestration platform enabling companies to coordinate the use and exchange of multiple utilities among themselves. That coordination will still be virtual during this pilot, but it will be the first time such data will be exchanged at industrial scale. This secure exchange of data is crucial in the project. To channel the data flows, an industrial cloud infrastructure is available to the participating companies. On top of that, a cluster energy management system by Yokogawa and KBC ensures the optimization of energy flows. The commercial valuation of the exchange between the companies and the energy markets then takes place on Distro Energy’s trading platform. This way both the different energy gains and losses, as well as the CO2 effect are given a value.