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How One Plant Saved Over $700,000 in Electricity Costs
Don Smiegielski is the plant manager at ERCO Worldwide, a sodium chlorate manufacturing operation just south of Grande Prairie. They work on the same site as a pulp mill, which is also one of their largest customers. Sodium chlorate is typically used to bleach pulp.
ERCO is the only remaining electrolytic chemical plant that remains in Alberta. The sector has been hit hard by increases in the cost of electricity.
We talked with Smiegielski to better understand how he keeps his plant efficient and productive.
PA: What does the world need sodium chlorate for?
DS: Sodium chlorate is used to bleach craft pulp. Craft pulp is used to make toilet paper, Kleenex, disposable diapers, writing paper. If people want white paper you need sodium chlorate.
PA: Can you sum up the manufacturing process?
DS: We take salt and water and we dissolve the salt and create a brine solution, like pickle juice. We run that through an electrolytic cell line where we pass electricity through the brine solution. It splits the water; the oxygen and salt react and it converts to sodium chlorate and hydrogen gas is our byproduct. We send the hydrogen to the pulp mill, which they use for heating purposes.
PA: What are the efficiency challenges you face? Why?
DS: The biggest concern in our plant is the cost of electricity. We use a large amount of electricity in the electrolytic process. We are always looking for ways to improve the use of electricity in the plant.
PA: How much electricity are we talking about here?
DS: We use about 31 to 32 megawatts of electricity in our plant. We tell people when they come in for tours that we use as much electricity in our little plant as the whole city of Grande Prairie, which is roughly 50,000 people. It’s 60-70% of our operating costs. So electricity for us is not an auxiliary thing, it’s a raw material that we require.
PA: How did you company address its energy efficiency concerns?
DS: We continuously monitor the use of electricity within the cell line. We watch the efficiency constantly. When it gets to a point that we’re not happy we shut the plant down and we clean the cells and the cell line with acid and remove all the hardness that builds up. After the cleaning it becomes very efficient again and we go through the cycle once more.
We’ve put in higher efficiency cells and developed better ways of cleaning the cells so that they are cleaner when they start and we get more efficiency out of them.
PA: What kind of cost savings have you achieved?
DS: We’re looking at $700,000 to $800,000 a year in cost savings today compared to what we were doing in 2002. Every year we’ve made little incremental steps.
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