New Appoaches in the Process Industries: The Manufacturing Plant of the Future

7

Water and Energy Challenges

By transforming raw materials into intermediate and end-user products, the process industry has a unique position, since its sits at the core of most industrial value chains. It is highly dependent on resources, and among them, energy and water are inextricably linked. Water is ubiquitous in energy production and energy is vital to the provision of water. This interconnection has been clearly identified in [IEA 07], in the World Energy Outlook 2012 [WEO 12]. Each resource faces rising demands and constraints in many regions as a consequence of economic and population growth and climate change, which will amplify their vulnerability to one another. For the energy sector, constraints on water can challenge the reliability of existing operations as well as the viability of future projects. The use of water for energy production can also have critical impacts on freshwater resources, affecting both their availability and quality.

This chapter identifies some strategies and synergies that can be used to address the water and energy challenges. It begins with a brief overview of the current energy system situation and of the linkage between energy and water issues. The following sections consider several process systems engineering methodologies that have proved their efficiency to tackle the energy–environment nexus and their applications to some key energy and water challenges.

7.1. The energy challenge

Sufficient energy supply and less greenhouse gas ...