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The Energy Verbund: Conserving resources |
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As well as saving production costs, BASF’s Verbund and the highly efficient power plants also protect the environment by helping to reduce waste and cut emissions while keeping the consumption of resources and transportation to a minimum.
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One clear example is that BASF has succeeded in breaking the link between production output and the use of energy derived from fossil fuels. Since the mid-1970s, the use of fossil energy sources for electrical power and steam generation has fallen by about 44 percent at the Ludwigshafen site. During the same period, however, production has risen by approximately 59 percent.
The creation of the Energy Verbund has played a crucial role in this success. By linking energy supplies, excess energy from exothermic chemical processes in the form of heat can be immediately converted into steam and fed into the BASF steam network. Instead of being released into the environment, this heat can be used as an energy source in other production plants. The results are impressive: Excess heat and incineration of production waste provide about 55 percent of BASF’s steam requirements.
To supply our production sites with energy we are increasingly using combined heat and power (CHP) plants to generate both heat and steam. Such cogeneration plants are an extremely effective means of supplying energy. With an overall fuel efficiency of almost 90 percent, they are the front-runners among energy conversion methods suitable for use on an industrial scale and are considered to be state-of-the-art. BASF currently operates 16 cogeneration plants worldwide. Partner companies at BASF sites operate another seven gas turbine plants with steam cogeneration, mainly to supply BASF. Since 2006, our new CHP power plant in Ludwigshafen has reduced CO2 emissions by more than 500,000 metric tons per year. Worldwide, we produce more than 75 percent of the electricity we need using CHP plants.
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