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Show Currently, increasing overall system efficiency represents the simplest, most direct method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from combustion. Process Improvement. The development and use of advanced controls and sensors as well as systems integration and analysis techniques are crucial to increasing process efficiency and product yield. Applied to combustion systems, these technologies can improve environmental quality, energy efficiency, and health/safety/reliability. They can reduce emissions and energy use by optimizing system operation, and can increase system safety and reliability by reducing unforced outages. Their benefits extend into product quality, staffing requirements, and other areas that affect overall plant economics. Systems integration and analysis will be key components in the design and operation of future combustion systems. Electric utility restructuring and industry's trend toward optimizing overall process and energy needs within a plant will encourage broad systems analysis to accurately define needs and evaluate performance. Fuel/Oxidant Choices. Fuel costs and availability are crucial to industry's choices of future technologies. The cost and availability of fuels drive the design and selection of equipment, the type of heat service provided, the emissions generated, and other key factors. Fuel availability also helps establish the level of risk involved with a particular process. As the quality of fuels decreases over the coming decades, clean fuels are likely to be burned first. Technology to burn dirty fuel cleanly (including technology to convert dirty fuel to clean fuel) will continue to be needed by the year 2020. S o m e industry experts consider hydrogen the "fuel of the future." This view is controversial because of hydrogen's explosive nature and its high production cost. Air has historically been the oxidant used in industrial combustion. Oxygen is increasingly being used to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in glass melting furnaces. If the cost of oxygen continues to be reduced with advanced generation technologies, the choice of oxidant m a y become an important factor in shaping future combustion technologies. Energy Efficiency. System energy efficiency by itself is not considered a major driving force. As an economic driver, however, energy cost (as a component of total cost) has a greater potential impact. A company that can reduce its overall energy costs by reducing its specific energy usage m a y gain a competitive advantage, especially in the high-temperature industries, in which energy represents a large portion of overall production costs. When examining total energy expenditures across all U.S. industries, a 1 % improvement in energy efficiency would save billions of dollars. Government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, if enacted, may become a driving force for improved industrial heating system efficiency. Policy and Politics. The unpredictability and power of governmental policy make it a key driver. THE VISION OF INDUSTRIAL COMBUSTION Manufacturers and users of combustion systems have defined their vision of burners, boilers, furnaces, and other process heating equipment in the year 2020. The system characteristics 6 |
