Rhodia, Inc.
Blue island, Illinois
Intern: Francis Costanzo
Illinois Institute of Technology
The Rhodia facility in Blue Island is a chemical manufacturing plant that
specializes in surfactants and structured liquid blends. The facility employs
approximately 50 people.
The intern project focused on energy efficiency and opportunities to reduce
the facility’s environmental footprint.
Results:
The intern made the following recommendations:
- Update and improve boilers or replace them with a newer system for an increase
in efficiency of 15% - 35%.
- Perform a steam system survey to identify unnecessary steam lines and opportunities
to insulate existing steam lines. Estimated cost savings is $20,000
a year.
- Devise a method to recover some of the energy from the at-risk condensate.
- Replace all unit steam heaters with unit electric heaters for a 25% reduction
in energy cost and savings of $76,000 annually. The payback period
is just over 1.5 years.
- Add a jet eduction mixing system to the wastewater equalization tank at
a cost of $65,000.
- Discontinue manual addition of defoamer to the wastewater treatment system. Resume
automatic addition of defoamer in the equalization tank to achieve a 25%
reduction in raw material costs for an annual savings of $13,000, with a
payback period of five years.
- Use a dashboard process information screen to determine trends in air and
water releases.
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